Walking About
by DreamSmith AJK
Summary: Faith was never the Slayer that Buffy, Giles, or anyone else wanted her to be. That doesn't mean she was never a hero. Come and see a side of her the Scoobies never imagined. Buffy/Faith
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

In early Season Three, Faith arrives in Sunnydale. However, it isn't long before she disappears; the first of several absences during that period. The first one falls between 'Homecoming' and 'Revelations', where we have the strange events of 'Band Candy'.

Buffy and the others most certainly could have used Faith's help there, but she was nowhere to be seen. Have you ever wondered why she left, where she went, and what she did there?

Disclaimer: The exteme coolness that is Faith cannot be owned, but Joss Whedon and company do suffer under that delusion. Plot and dialogue and other stuff is mine, Faith is not.  
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10:31 a.m.  
Friday  
November 8, 1998

"-While your mom's out of town, Will?"

Xander's voice carried clearly to her ears, and she turned her head unerringly to the source. There, that intersection where the high-school's corridors widened. The area had been turned into a sort of student lounge, with groupings of chairs and a few soda and snack machines.

She'd been wandering the halls, looking for her sister Slayer and hoping that nobody would ask her if she was supposed to be in a class somewhere. Now she began walking towards the sound of that familiar voice. Xander would probably know where Buffy was, and if so then he would probably even tell her.

After all, so far none of the blonde Slayer's friends had gotten up the nerve to actually say to her face what they obviously thought of her.

"Well, that's the thing. I mean, she'll be gone a whole week, and with my dad already gone to that sales convention in St. Louis, I would be there all by myself."

Just the sound of Willow's voice made her feet slow.

_Yeah Red, you'll be all by yourself in that huge, beautiful house you live in. Well boo-fucking-hoo._ She snorted softly to herself in disgust. Xander, however, sounded concerned.

"Are you sure that's a good idea? I mean, I know you're a big girl and all, but there's been a lot of stuff happening lately. Zombies, Oz-wolf escapes…. Not to mention whoever that guy was who put together that 'Slayerfest' thing where everyone was hunting Buffy and Cordelia."

Standing motionless now just around the corner, the girl curled her hands into trembling fists.

_And that's another one I owe you losers. If I hadn't let you talk me into coming straight to the homecoming dance that night, it would have been me in that limo with Buffy instead of Cordelia._ She closed her eyes to keep the sudden tears of frustration from leaking out onto her cheeks. _Damn it! Me an B would have shredded those losers! It would have been them running away from us, not the other way around. _She opened her eyes, and if they remained dry in obedience to her silent command, her breath still came ragged and shallow. _But it didn't happen that way, did it? Buffy called Giles for help, not me. She came to the library first, not to the gym, where I was waiting for her. It was her and queen-bitch Cordy who fought together, not her and me. She took on those German twins and their assault rifles alone, rather than come and get me to help. All I was able to do for her that night was make sure that shithead Scott Hope didn't get to enjoy the night with that nameless bimbo he brought. And later, when B left without even telling me what had happened, when she left me just standing there, after I'd gone and used a month's worth of food money to buy a fucking_ dress _just for her, when I'd _worn _that fucking dress for her…. All I could do after that was go and find Mr. Hope, and follow him when he left -alone-- and blindside him in the parking lot. I let him feel some of what I was feeling right then, all right. Sure, I stopped short of killing him, and I made sure he never saw my face, but I think he got the message. It'll be a long time before he hurts Buffy again, before he hurts anyone again. _

She leaned one shoulder against the wall, gazing sightlessly at the ugly paint that covered the surface in slightly uneven layers.

_'Course, it'll be a long time before he manages to eat solid food again, but I don't regret it. I only wish that Buffy would just…._

"I know; it's not exactly a safe town to be alone in, is it?" Willow said.

The girl around the corner had to fight to keep from bursting into bitter laughter. The little witch-girl thought she knew about being alone? She should try it from--

"So what are you going to do?" Xander asked. "I'd invite you to stay with me, but as you know, my house isn't a place you go to willingly." He paused, and she could almost hear his grin. "Compared to where I live, Faith's motel looks positively comfy."

The girl just stared at the corner that separated her from the two friends who were having such a good time talking about things that had nothing at all to do with her. They didn't know what it was like to sit in that room, alone, day after day after day….

They didn't know, and they didn't care to know.

"Xander Harris, that's just mean."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry." He didn't sound too repentant, though. "So what are you going to do? Go and shack up with Oz?"

"Uh huh, my mom would love that idea." Willow said, sarcasm dripping from her voice.

The girl pushed herself away from the corner, standing straight once more.

_I don't want to listen to any more of this crap. I just need to find B, see if I can somehow manage to spend some time with her. _As much as it pained her to admit it, that Scott guy had been right about one thing; the older Slayer _had_ been acting kind of strange lately. The first week or two she'd known Buffy, the other girl had been wonderfully attentive. Oh, sure, they'd rubbed each other the wrong way at first, but after they'd dusted Kakistos things had been great. They'd hung out together, gone Slaying together, talked about music, fighting, the monsters they'd killed and the places they'd like to go and see someday…. And then one day it had all just stopped. Buffy had all but stopped talking to her, had stopped laughing, had dropped a lot of training sessions…. Right about the time that idiot with the Jekyll and Hyde routine had shown up, something had gone out of the blonde Slayer. Since that night, shadows had constantly darkened those green eyes. The girl wondered if it was because Buffy had been forced to break 'Mr. Hyde's' neck, but that didn't seem to be it. Maybe she could get the other Slayer to open up, to share whatever it was. Maybe… but of course she had to _find_ her first.

Gritting her teeth against the necessity of having to see and speak to the two people talking around the corner, she took a step forward.

"-But when I told Buffy about the situation, she told me not to worry about it." The red-haired girl continued. "She said that I could stay with her for as long as I wanted, no problem."

The girl froze in place, still just out of sight of the two.

_What?_

Xander seemed to agree.

"You're moving in with the Buffster? Dare I ask if you'll be, uh, sharing the sleeping accommodations?" He sounded very hopeful of that; she could practically hear him rubbing his hands together in male-pig glee. "And possibly sharing the occasional warm, soapy shower as well?"

"Xander!" The sound of a blow impacting flesh, and not all that light and playful. "You know it isn't like that!" She sighed. "But I'm glad she offered. It'll sure beat being all by myself in an empty house."

"Uh huh, that's our Buffy though; always coming through for the friends."

The girl remained there for a few minutes more, not hearing whatever else the two chose to discuss. Instead, she stood with her arms folded across her stomach, her face lowered as she tried to digest what she'd heard.

_She offered-_

Poor Willow is all alone in her big house, and she invites-

What the fuck does she think it's like where I_ spend all my--?_

She always comes through for her friends, huh? Well, I guess somebody must have misplaced my application for membership.

Half-blinded by a red haze of fury, Faith turned away. With long, determined strides she headed for a different part of the school.

* * * * *

Nothing had changed; none of it. The welcoming smiles and syrupy-sweet words that everyone had been spouting in the beginning had been forgotten with predicable speed, and here she was; still on the outside looking in. After less than a month in Sunnydale Faith was already sick of the place.

And of the people.

_Screw this! I don't have to put up with this bullshit! I never have before, and I won't start now!_

Faith; wild child, Vampire Slayer and all-around tough chick, was royally pissed. And the worst part of it was, she couldn't even let it out.

Well, not in so many words, anyway. She settled for throwing open the doors to the library with enough force to propel them through a hundred and eighty degrees, where they slammed against the walls to either side with a deafening dual crash. Inside, her headlong stride gradually lost momentum until she reached the center of the room, where she came to a stop. Giles was nowhere in view, so she took a few moments to stand there and just breathe; pulling air in and then pushing it out again, slow and steady. As a way to regain her emotional equilibrium it came in a poor second to, say, trashing the entire place, but for now it would have to do.

"Faith?" She jumped, whirling to find the Englishman standing in the doorway to his office. He looked from her to the doors which she'd opened with such force, and then back to her, a disapproving expressing drawing the lines in his face slightly deeper than usual. "Was that really quite necessary? This_ is_ a library, after all."

She wasn't in the mood for stupid rules, or for his stern looks, and so she got right down to it.

"I'm leaving."

She had the satisfaction of seeing his eyebrows shoot upwards. They didn't have a chance of reaching his receding hairline, but they sure did make a good try of it.

"Leaving?" He asked, cautiously.

Faith nodded, but even as she did so she found herself glancing away from the look he was giving her. She couldn't help doing it, and that was just another source of helpless anger. Giles intimidated her. Oh, not physically; that was one area where she would never, ever have to feel insecure again. No, this was something else, and the books that filled the room sort of symbolized it: Giles was smarter than she was. Way, way smarter, and she hated that. It made her feel like all the Slayer powers didn't really make her that special after all. It made her feel….

Never mind how it made her feel. He was still looking at her, waiting for an explanation.

"Not, y'know, for good or anything." She managed, studying the pile of tomes that occupied the center of the main table as a way to avoid meeting his eyes. "I've just got itchy feet or something; I need to get out of here for a few days, clear my head and stuff."

_She opens up her home to poor Willow, when she's know all this time how I'm having to live, and how much I hate it there._ What she was feeling right now, the rage that was coiling through her like a river of white-hot metal; it frightened her. She knew herself well enough to picture what might happen if she ran into Willow right now. Even seeing Buffy might trigger something, and she didn't want to hurt the other girl; despite everything she was feeling right now, she never wanted to cause Buffy pain. And so she would leave, at least for a little while.

_And it bothers me that I'm even stopping on my way out of town to let someone know. Why bother? Does Buffy, do any of them ever take the time to let me know what's going on? _

It wasn't like, (A) anyone was even likely to realize she wasn't around in the first place, and (B); that they would actually give a shit about it if they did notice. If Buffy hadn't known how taking in Willow as a roomie would make her feel then she really didn't understand the younger Slayer at all.

Giles, however, was now frowning at her.

"I'm not sure it's a good idea for you to go walkabout, Faith, especially by yourself."

Despite everything, hearing that nearly made her smile. He didn't like the thought of her going off alone? Well, she had a feeling he'd like the alternative even less, but what the hell?

"'Kay then," She said, agreeably, and with all the casualness she could muster. "If you're worried about me getting into trouble, how about sending Buffy along to keep me company."

_Maybe it would work. She comes with me, and Mrs. Summers is still around to take care of wittle baby Willow._

A sidelong glance showed her the Englishman standing where he'd been in the middle of moving towards the portable tea setup he kept just inside the door to his small office. Her words had apparently frozen him in place, and he was now staring at her in dismay. Pretending she hadn't seen his reaction, she shrugged carelessly. "I think that maybe the two of us_ should_ go and do a long patrol every once in awhile; I'll bet there are bad guys doin' stuff around the outskirts of the hellmouth zone, and you guys just stay here in town and never see 'em." It was even possible that it was true; not that that was the reason why she wanted to go. "Me an' B can run a sweep in a couple of days." His mouth was actually hanging open, he was so horrified. Seeing that, she couldn't help but lose a little of her bright smile, a wicked little smirk stealing in to take its place on her lips. "Don't worry, guy. I'll take real good care of her for ya." _Yeah,_ really_ good care of her._ "And I'll have her back here, safe and sound in time for class on Monday."

Maybe that last part, where she was making it sound like a date, was a little much for him; it probably only served to confirm what he suspected about her feelings for his Slayer.

"N-No, I don't think that such a thing is called for. The, um, patrol, that is." He did that thing he always did when he got flustered, taking his glasses off and wiping them clean with a little too much vigor as he stared at her. "The energies of the Hellmouth are concentrated here, as are the creatures in resonance with it. Any supernatural activity beyond Sunnydale's borders should be minimal to nonexistent." He nodded, looking convinced that the matter was settled… and looking relieved that he'd managed to prevent the Buffy and Faith expedition. "It wouldn't hurt to take a look, of course, but I should think that one Slayer should suffice to handle anything that arises in the outlying areas." It was amazing, how sure of himself he could sound, even when there was no way he could know what the hell he was talking about. "If you feel you need a break from the hellmouth, then I suppose a brief patrol to make sure of things would be for the best. For everyone." That last part was a quiet mutter as he turned away, but of course she heard it loud and clear.

She wondered if he'd meant for her to hear?

He probably had, the bastard.

That was it; without another word he went back into his office, and there she stood, alone again.

_Well, shit, dude; don't strain yourself tryin' to talk me into staying in town and working things out with everybody who's ignorin' me, or going to the trouble of giving me advice on what to do if I do run into anything out there._

Not really surprised by any part of his reaction, or by his obvious dislike of her, Faith turned and walked back out the doors, treating them a little more gently this time.

After all, it wasn't their fault that her life was continuing along on its usual path of being total shit, now was it?

When she thought about it, Faith supposed she could understand why Giles had a problem with her. Or at least, with her and Buffy being together in any way, shape, or form. After all, he treated the blonde girl like she was his own freaking kid; it was no wonder he got a little crazy when a relative stranger started hanging around. A foul-mouthed, hyper-violent, gutter-trash stranger, at that. It made perfect sense when you looked at it like that. Still, it was almost funny, how far he went to protect his little girl.

When it came time for the Slayers to patrol Sunnydale, Giles always gave the two of them different cemeteries to investigate. 'Making the best use of combat resources', he called it. Faith would be willing to bet good money that he'd never referred to Buffy as a 'resource' before the second Slayer showed up, and that he never called the blonde girl that to her face, either. No, it was only when Faith was around that he tried to be a by-the-book hard-case.

When something did need both girls there to take care of it, he made it a point to come along, to 'observe'. Even their training was something that he divided, scheduling them for different times (when he bothered to train Faith at all). Buffy herself had questioned that one, and in the face of her very sensible arguments he'd let the matter drop. That minor defeat didn't mean that he stopped trying to subtly keep them apart.

And even though Faith could mostly understand the man's problem with her, she wasn't quite sure what had given her away; after all, aside from the monster lore, Giles wasn't usually that good at picking up on the subtle clues. It was pretty doubtful that he'd been able to see how the blonde Slayer affected her when they were sparring. Of course, just being around Buffy was usually enough to get Faith to feeling all warm and feelin' that low down tickle, but when they were training…. When the older girl was standing right up against her, showing her the weird beginning stance for a uniquely Buffy version of a spinning back kick, and that pale gold, baby-soft skin brushed against hers…. Or when they were straining against each other, hands grappling as they were both going for a takedown hold, and Buffy's face was so close to hers that all she could see was that pouty lower lip, and she just knew that it would be so very easy to lean forward a couple of inches and see what it tasted like…. Well, okay; unless Giles was blind maybe he had been able to notice that something was going on after all.

Or at least that something had the potential to go on, if Buffy would only wake up to how her sister Slayer felt about her. Just the thought of how wonderful everything would become if that moment ever came to pass was enough to make Faith sigh quietly, and her angry stride slowed to a more relaxed pace. The occasional student she passed in the school hallway looked at her strangely, and she wondered what kind of wistful (if not downright idiotic) smile she had plastered on her face.

She sighed again, this time with regret. Yeah, it would be great if she and Buffy were to get a regular 'thang' going on… but it would never happen if the Watcher had his way. No, there was no doubt that Giles had figured out Faith's feelings for 'his' Slayer, and he obviously didn't plan on letting it happen any time soon. Despite her repeated pleas, he wouldn't spring for any workout gear for her hotel room. Instead, she had to settle for an old foam mattress duct-taped to a post; and that was surely no incentive for Buffy to come over to Faith's place so that they could train together. Her other option was to train with the older Slayer's gear at the library… except Giles knew that she disliked coming to the high school. It was the same thing she felt around the man himself; Buffy was still in school, her friends were still in school, and even though she knew that it was pointless for a Slayer to waste any of her short life learning how to do algebra, or cut open and catalogue frog innards, the place still filled Faith with a sense of failure. Being inside the school only intensified her feeling of not belonging, not being good enough… and that was something she didn't need. Besides, even when she was there, the two of them could never manage to train for more than a few minutes without Giles looking in on them, or Xander stopping by to drool at the two of them in their sweaty clothes, or Willow showing up to drag Buffy off on some vital errand. If she didn't know better, she'd say that everyone_ but_ Buffy knew what Faith wanted… and was determined to keep her from ever having it. That was probably just her paranoia talking, though. After all, Willow couldn't have set things up so that both of her parents were out of town, just on the off chance that Buffy would invite her to stay over… could she?

She scowled, turning down another wide hallway. The exit was just down there at the end; another minute and she'd be out of this place, and on her way out of the town she was rapidly coming to hate.

_And I think I'm pretty close to hating all of these people, too. All of them, with their nice houses, and rich parents, and wonderful fucking futures. If I have to stay here, and take their shit for another few weeks, I_ will_ hate 'em all._ She considered that for a moment, and finally she had to admit that it wasn't quite true. _Okay, I'll hate most of 'em. No matter how much she pisses me off, the one person here that I could never hate is-_

"Faith!"

_--Buffy._

The Slayer turned, and there she was, just emerging from one of the classrooms.

Small, blonde, beautiful….

Perfect.

Buffy flashed one of those exquisite little half-smiles as she shifted a couple of textbooks she was holding securely against her stomach.

"Hey there," The older girl said, looking up from the four or five inches she lacked in matching Faith's own height. "Were you looking for me?"

_Always._ Faith thought, and in her distraction at the other girl's sudden appearance, she came so close to saying it out loud that her lips actually twitched.

"Ah, yeah."

Even that much took a struggle with an abruptly uncooperative throat, but it earned her an arched eyebrow from the blonde Slayer. That was fine with Faith. She could stand here in silence and watch Buffy's face all day long and be one happy girl.

_God, when did I get this sappy?_ She wondered. _This, from someone who thinks she's so tough._ Somehow, though, thoughts like that didn't matter. Not when she was standing face to face (well, face to top-of-B's-head) with this particular girl.

It was true; Faith was in love. She'd just turned sixteen three days before, unnoticed, uncelebrated; no one had asked when her birthday was and so she'd never said. She'd never felt anything like this for someone either. Despite having lots of experience in the physical side of things, she'd never once felt any emotional connection… until now.

Gazing up at what was probably a fairly lost-looking expression on Faith's face, Buffy inclined her head a fraction, her green eyes sparkling. That shadow still lurked within them, though. It was like there was something weighing on the girl every waking moment; some sadness, or maybe a secret too painful to bear alone, but too awful to share.

"Well, that sounded really convincing." She said in a wry tone. "If you're busy with something else then it's no problem-"

"No!" The instinctive, half-panicked denial burst from Faith with a little too much volume. She found a cocky grin and tried to cover her slip. "I mean, yeah, I _wasn't_ exactly lookin' for you right this minute, but I'm still glad I ran into you." Which was only the truth, of course. The older girl nodded agreeably, leaning back against the lockers. She looked willing to talk for a few minutes, which provided an excellent opportunity.

Because when it came to something like this, Faith wasn't inclined to play by the rules some dried-up British librarian came up with to protect his ever-so-righteous sense of what was 'proper' for the two young girls in his charge.

Just because Giles had vetoed the idea of inviting Buffy along on the walkabout, that didn't mean the blonde couldn't actually _go._

If, that is, Buffy wanted to.

That 'If' loomed large in Faith's thoughts, even as the class bell rang loudly, followed moments later by an outpouring of students from doors up and down the hallway. The sudden crush of people around them of course made it impossible to carry on any kind of conversation. Faith gestured towards the exit, which opened out onto the central courtyard. Buffy nodded agreement, and led the way, with the younger Slayer following close behind.

Outside, the sun shone brightly, illuminating the pale streaks that highlighted the otherwise dark gold of the smaller girl's hair. The sight was enough to make Faith's breath catch.

_It isn't just that she's beautiful._ She thought to herself. _She is beautiful, sure, but if that's all that mattered then I'd have a crush on Cordelia. She's beautiful too… and I doubt there's a more pathetic waste of space on the entire planet. Well, except for Xander._

Moving with her usual, unknowing grace, Buffy seated herself on a stone bench. Feeling incredibly self-conscious, Faith sat down beside her. Clearing her throat nervously, the younger girl spoke.

"I just wanted to ask you why-"

_--Why Willow matters more to you than I do. Why they_ all_ matter more to you than I do._

She shook her head and tried again.

"I mean, I was sort of wondering when-"

_--When you're going to notice that I worship you? Is it so hard to see? How can it be, when everybody else can tell there's something between us, but you can't? I love you, Buffy. I love you even though you're so self-absorbed, so wrapped up in your own private Buffyverse that nobody else's problems manage to make it into that blonde head of yours._

She glanced away from Buffy's curious eyes, out across the courtyard where students were now wandering around and killing a few minutes between classes.

_God, I know this is stupid; I know that I'm verging on being a stalker here, obsessing about someone who's never once showed any kind of interest in me… like that. But it could work! She could love me, I know she could! There's so much of me in her; I can see it sometimes, rumbling just underneath that perfect, proper surface she's learned how to show the world. She knows what I know, she's seen the darkness and the blood and the fury that make us Slayers what we are. _

_We're the only ones in the world who can understand what it's like; that has to count for something._

"Faith?" She turned her head back, meeting those beautiful green eyes and instantly losing herself inside them. "Are you feeling okay?"

_No._

"Sure. Five by five." She answered, showing her teeth in a cocky grin. Buffy smiled back.

"'Five by five'? And that's Faith-speak for…?"

She shrugged.

"Never mind. You know, I was kind of wondering if you were feeling okay. You seem kinda, I don't know, depressed or somethin', lately." Faith realized that she was still gazing into Buffy's eyes, that maybe that eye contact had gone on too long, so she glanced down at her hands for a second before looking up again. "Is there anything I can do to help?" Jeez, that sounded lame. She struggled onward. "If you wanted to, uh, talk, or go and work out, or… anything…."

_Please. Tell me, like you'd tell one of them. Trust me with whatever it is, like you'd trust one of them._ She was staring at the other girl again, but she couldn't help it. She was willing Buffy to let her inside, practically praying for some sign that she wasn't just deluding herself with the hope that there could be something more than this distant, almost professional friendship that they seemed to be settling into….

Buffy smiled, and it was a softly beautiful, heartbreakingly sad little smile.

"Thanks," She said, her voice soft, with that wonderfully odd little pronunciation she sometimes slipped into when she was concentrating too hard on what she was saying. "But really, I'm doing fine. I guess I'm still a little beaten up because of the Scott thing, but basically I'm good." The shadows in her eyes had darkened for a moment there, and Faith felt the remnants of that anger stir once more.

"He shouldn't have done that. He shouldn't have hurt you like that." She growled, her body tensing slightly with the need to lash out at someone. Of course, she'd already lashed out at that particular target with about as much force as he could survive. Any more of that and she'd be reading his obituary in the paper.

Funny, she didn't think she'd be too sad about that, if it were to happen. Buffy just shrugged, looking down at the stack of books that lay between them.

"'Sokay. This wasn't nearly as bad as my last breakup, believe me."

Faith's eyes narrowed at that.

Angel.

Back at the beginning, when the others were still comfortable with her being around, they'd filled her in on Buffy's ex. Willow especially had been big on how it had been a cosmic love affair; soulmates forever, destined in the stars, blah, blah, blah. She'd also described how having to kill the vampire had nearly killed Buffy; how it had taken her months to recover. In fact, Buffy had come back to Sunnydale only weeks before Faith herself had arrived.

Looking at the older Slayer now, seeing how just thinking about Angel only intensified the pain Buffy was obviously experiencing, Faith regretted that she hadn't been around to kill him herself, thus sparing the blonde girl the anguish of having to do it.

_And sure, I'll own up to being a little jealous,_ She admitted to herself. _But that's not all of it, either. From what I hear, he wanted into her pants from the first day he was in town, and when he finally got his fuck, he conveniently managed to 'lose' his soul. A hundred years and he never managed to figure out that little detail of his 'curse'? Yeah, right. And then he spends months messing with her head; stalking her, killing people she knew, people she cared about, and then making her think that everything he did and everyone he killed is her fault! It's a good thing ol' Angel is dead and gone already, or I'd come down on him so hard it'd kill his ancestors._

And their friends.

She took a deep breath, looking at Buffy again. The Slayer looked so small, sitting there, so vulnerable, that without even thinking about what she was doing Faith reached out and lay her hand gently on the girl's shoulder.

"Not everyone who says they love you is going to be lying." Her voice sounded a little huskier than usual, but that might have just been because of her heart pounding so loudly in her ears. "Maybe there's someone out there who really does care about you, who wants to be with you forever, always."

Buffy looked back at her, and there wasn't any sign of comprehension in her eyes, no indication that she understood what Faith was trying to say. There was only a troubled look, a punishing uncertainty that there could ever be anything but lies, but pain.

"Forever?" She asked, though the younger girl wasn't sure if she was the one being asked. "I'm not sure there is a forever. I thought some things were settled, that they couldn't hurt me anymore, and just when I've accepted it-" She looked to be on the edge of tears, and the shoulder under Faith's hand shook as that tiny body was wracked with an almost subliminal shudder. "And it was so_ hard_ the first time, and I thought I did what I had to do, and now it's all back just like before, and-" Buffy looked at the younger girl, and her beautiful, green, shadowed eyes were bright with tears.

"Faith, I…."

"Buffy!"

She hastily pulled her hand back, and both of them looked around to see Willow walking across the courtyard towards where they sat. Faith, seeing Buffy wipe hastily at her eyes and then bravely smile a welcome, felt sick anger well up within her.

_Right there; she was going to tell me what's wrong with her right there, and I know I could have helped. So of course Red has to show up._

Willow came to a stop in front of the bench, beaming with her usual empty cheerfulness.

"What'cha doing?" She chirped, and then, for all the world like she hadn't seen her until just that moment, she turned and looked at Faith. "Hey there. You guys talking about Slayer stuff?"

Faith gave her a poisonous smile.

"Oh yeah, absolutely." She leaned back on the bench, just incidentally showing the flat-chested girl her own generous endowments. "'Cause that's all I'm good for, y'know; Slayer talk."

Willow took a step back, folding her arms across her chest in a self-conscious gesture. She was visibly struggling for a comeback when Buffy saved her.

"Hey, Will." The blonde Slayer was shaking off whatever it was that she'd been about to tell Faith; rebuilding the walls around whatever was torturing her. "We were just talking; no big deal. What's up?"

Faith looked at her, hurt by the casual dismissal.

_No, no big deal, B. It was just you finally treating me like someone who might matter in your life, like someone you could trust with the real you. That's all it was._

Willow, bitch though she was, still noticed the tremor in Buffy's voice, and the near-tears brightness of her eyes.

"Oh, what's wrong?" She knelt in front of the girl, her own green eyes searching the Slayer's. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Faith was gritting her teeth again.

_Yes, you little shit! She was talking about it to me!_

Saying it out loud would only make things worse; she knew that to be true, so she stayed silent. Buffy was shaking her head now, gathering up her books.

"No, I'm fine. Just the post-homecoming blues, is all."

Willow took her by the arm, dragging the smaller girl to her feet.

"Well, I've got a free period, so how about I show you some wacky telekinetic juggling to cheer you up? I've been practicing with paper clips, and I can do two at once now." She gave Buffy a somewhat sheepish look. "Well, usually. But I'm getting better!"

Buffy's smile looked almost genuine this time, and she started off with the other girl. After a few steps, though, she turned and looked back at Faith.

"Did you want to come with…?"

From where she sat on the bench, the younger Slayer shook her head.

"No thanks. I'm good." She tried to find something else to add, thought about telling the older girl that she was leaving for awhile, but with Willow looking at her over Buffy's shoulder the words wouldn't come. Was that smug gleam really there in the red-head's eyes, or was she just imagining it? Buffy shrugged.

"All right. I'll see you later."

The two of them headed off towards the doors that led inside, leaving Faith to sit there alone.

"Yeah," She mumbled, looking down at nothing in particular. "See you later… I guess."

* * * * *


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

See Chapter One for Disclaimer  
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She'd spent an hour or so staring out the window at the passing scenery without really seeing it when the thrum of the truck's engine abruptly changed. Faith blinked, coming back from the dark places within herself where she'd been aimlessly wandering. The interstate highway they'd been on continued off into the distance, but they were off of it now, the tractor trailer slowing in stages as it moved down the approach to a roadside rest area. Just ahead there was a large parking lot, currently occupied by a dozen or so cars and vans, many of them with out of state license plates and strap-on luggage containers perched on their roofs. The rest area itself was a medium-sized building; its neatly arranged landscaping looked picture-perfect in the afternoon sun. Inside one would likely find spacious bathrooms and any number of coffee and snack machines. Supressing the urge to yawn, Faith turned and looked across at the man driving.

"What's up? Can't hold it 'till we get to Monterey?"

From what she'd heard, whenever Buffy got tired of Sunnydale she liked to head south, towards Los Angeles. That being the case, when Faith had hitched her way out of town she'd headed in the opposite direction. This truck was her third ride of the afternoon; looking like she did meant that there usually wasn't a lack of people willing to give her a lift.

"Just makin' a pit stop, little lady," He answered. "Plus I thought you might want to stretch your legs a bit. An' it might be a good idea to hit the can yourself; it's a long way till the next restroom."

She studied him for a moment, but he was busy watching where he was driving as he maneuvered the big vehicle into one of the parking slots designated for trucks. Ol' Dean was a nice enough guy, she supposed. Sure, he'd been leering at her a little whenever he thought she wasn't paying attention, but there wasn't a law against looking. He looked to be in his early forties; a slightly scruffy white guy, a bit overweight because his job was basically just sitting behind a wheel all day, but not too terrible looking for all that. Riding in the passenger seat of his truck was a huge improvement on the little Celica with the bouncing, screaming eight year olds that had been her previous lift. Sure, it'd been nice of the young couple to stop for her, but twenty minutes of sharing the back seat with the terror twins had nearly cost her her sanity.

Something out the window caught her eye, and she craned her head to get a better look. There, just beside the entrance to the building, was an honest to goodness injun-type teepee.

"What the fuck is that doing here?"

Dean finally finished the process of parking his truck, ran the gearshift through a final elaborate movement, and engaged the parking brakes. A muffled discharge of air from somewhere back underneath the trailer and the vehicle was still.

Or at least almost still; for some reason she still didn't get, truck drivers seemed very reluctant to actually turn off the engine unless they were going to be gone quite a while. The man leaned over towards her (a bit closer than was really necessary, she noticed) and looked towards where she was pointing.

"Oh, that." He straightened slightly, though he was still close enough that the material of his shirt was brushing her arm. "There's a couple'a Indian reservations up through here. A lot of the 'skins make their living sellin' trinkets to the tourists. Rugs, silverwork, beads; that kind of thing." He reached across her and ran a finger over the tattoo on her right bicep. "That's a tribal tat, isn't it?"

Faith gave him a level stare.

"Sort of." His fingers were still on her arm, stroking slowly up and down as he watched her. There didn't seem to be any kind of threat going on here, but still….

"Okay, what's the deal?" She asked, blunt and to the point.

He grinned.

"Well, like I said before; it's a long way to the next rest stop." He looked down at her arm, tracing a line down her bicep, across the inside of her elbow, to where her hand lay on her thigh. Glancing up at her, he gave a little shrug. "I figure, since I'm being nice enough to take you three hundred miles, you might feel like being nice in return." He tilted his head, indicating the sleeper compartment just behind where they sat. "What do you say?"

Faith leaned back in her seat and thought about it.

She wasn't angry; he wasn't attacking her, he was just asking. It wasn't even the first time she'd had this particular situation come up; sure, her looks helped her catch rides, but they also tended to make people think she might be willing to give a little something back in trade. She'd done it before, too. It was no big deal; people had been using her body, either with her consent or without it, for a long, long time now. These days, so long as she was in control of things, she had no problem with using it to get what she wanted. If it made her feel good too, then so much the better. Dean was a long way from the best looking guy she'd ever fucked, but he was a ways from the bottom of the heap, too. And it was a long way yet to Monterey. If a quick grunting session in the back of the truck was all it cost her then she'd count it cheap fare.

And yet….

She shook her head, not even really sure about why she was turning him down.

"Sorry, man." She caught his hand in her own. Crushing every bone would have taken her hardly any effort at all, but there was no reason to go there. She merely pulled his hand away from her arm, and held it away until he drew back. Predictably, the man's face tightened with a mix of anger and sullen resentment.

"What? I'm not good enough for you?" He slid back over to his side of the seat, not looking at her as he grabbed the door handle and opened the door. "I'm going to take a leak, and I want you gone before I get back." He jumped down, and the last thing she heard before he slammed the door was a muttered "-No free rides, little white-trash bitch-"

Faith sat there for a few seconds, watching as he stomped away towards the building.

_Great. Now what do I do? Most of the people here are tourists, and I_ don't_ want to spend another few hours trapped with a couple of brats climbing all over me, fighting with each other and screaming at mommy and daddy._ She looked towards where Dean had disappeared inside. _And when did I get to be all goody-goody an' morally opposed to random acts of screwing?_ She wasn't sure; it was just that somehow it had seemed like something….

Her eyes suddenly widened, and she groaned with the realization.

_…Like something that Buffy wouldn't approve of. _She shook her head in an attempt at denial, but it was all too true._ Shit. Even when she gets me so pissed off and twisted into knots that I have to skip town, I'm still tyin' to please her. Like she'd even know about me and this guy doin' the nasty in the back of his truck._

That was it, though. Ever since she'd first hit Sunnydale; well, ever since that thing with Kakistos, anyway, she'd been trying to conform to the Buffy code of Slayer behavior. Sure, she really sucked at it, but the thing was, she was_ trying._ She rarely drank in front of the other girl anymore, since that first time she'd had a beer while with Buffy, and the older Slayer had given her an unmistakable 'look' that made her feelings on the whole 'you're not yet twenty-one, and even if you were alcohol is just so very gross' thing very clear. Same thing with shoplifting, even though it had only been a measly tube of lipstick that Buffy had seen her take. Nope, none of things that Faith took as her basic rights and privileges seemed to sit well with ol' blondie. Sometimes it seemed like the only emotion she could provoke in Buffy at all was a faint air of disapproval… which was so very far away from what she wanted the other girl to feel towards her.

No wonder she'd finally had to get out of there for a while.

And speaking of getting out….

Faith popped the door open and picked up her worn backpack, pausing only to reach over and snag Dean's cigarettes and lighter from where he'd left them on the dash. So what if she hadn't smoked in more than six months (Ms. Northam, the Watcher who had found her, hadn't approved of any of Faith's habits, including that one), and so what if the Scooby gang, and practically all of Sunnydale High was one big anti-smoking poster? She could do what she wanted, and if Buffy didn't like it then that was just too bad.

Even inside her own head that sounded awfully petulant, and she grimaced as she tucked the pack inside her jacket pocket.

With a resigned sigh, she slid off her seat, dropping the three or four feet to the ground-

--And when the soles of her boots struck the asphalt of the parking lot, a resounding _Thoom_ passed through her from feet to scalp, as if she'd just stomped on the head of a giant bass drum. She came off the ground in a sort of instinctive half-leap, frantically grabbing hold of the side of he truck in an attempt to keep her feet off the pavement. Hanging there, her boots safely on the chrome ledge beside the door, she threw looks in every direction, trying to see that had caused that bizarre… well, it hadn't been a sound, exactly, but it had been_ something._

Nothing odd was in sight, though. Random tourists, the highway running past, grass, the rest area building over there and some trees beyond it… nothing. Moving with care, Faith lowered one foot, and just barely brushed the toe of her boot across the blacktop of the parking lot.

Nothing happened.

She scowled unhappily, then pressed her foot down.

Everything seemed fine. Letting go of the truck, she stood there for a few moments, still waiting for the weirdness to return, but things stayed very normal.

_--The hell?_

She spent a few more seconds glaring around at all the normality, then shrugged.

_Okaaaay. I guess it was just my imagination. _She adjusted the pack strap across her shoulder and set off towards the building._ Funny, I would have sworn that I didn't have one. An imagination, that is._

And on the subject of overactive imaginations, she suddenly had the oddest prickling sensation between her shoulder blades…. Trying her best to keep it casual, she reached up and gave her hair an unnecessary push back over her shoulder, and tossed a glance back behind her.

Nobody was there; or rather, there was, but it was just a group of five people loading themselves back into their minivan in preparation for the next leg of their trip to wherever. Faith gave her hair a nervous tug, then tossed it back for real, turning her attention back towards the building. She didn't really need to use the facilities, but as she surveyed the travelers wandering around, drinking coffee and trying to recover from long, sleep-inducing stretches of driving, a thought occurred to her. It was a little risky, but this wasn't Sunnydale; if she screwed up here, nobody back on the Hellmouth would ever hear about it.

--Unless she actually got arrested or something, and that wasn't real likely, was it? Faith made sure her pack would stay on her shoulder without her holding it, then flexed her hands, loosening them up.

_All right now. Who looks good and tired, here? Hey, _he_ seems mostly out of it._

The Slayer moved towards her chosen target, a tall man wearing a Denver Broncos windbreaker. He was walking slowly along the front of the building, just one of a couple dozen people who were doing the same thing; staring at the Indians selling their stuff, reading the informative tourist-info plaques that lined the walk, and generally doing their best to shake off their weariness before getting back behind the wheel. As he turned away from one of the signs proclaiming the area's wonders (Visit the scenic Cachuma Lake Recreational Area!) she 'accidentally' stumbled into him.

Just as she 'accidentally' reached for his wallet.

Now, before the whole Slayer deal had come along, she had been living on the streets of Boston, and there had been occasions when she'd tried her hand at pickpocketing. She'd been awful at it. Nowadays, even with the enhanced coordination and reaction speed she'd received, she was still a long way from being great, but sometimes 'good' was good enough.

Like now. The guy took a half-step back, automatically reaching out to steady her as she leaned against him. When he got a good look at her, and his tired brain finally registered just what those two warm, soft objects that had briefly pressed into his chest had been, he was reduced to hasty, embarrassed apologies. She smiled brightly, told him that it had all been her fault and not to worry about it, and then she walked away… with his wallet safely stashed in her jacket pocket. About twenty yards further on, and nearly to the spot where the teepee was set up just across from the building's entrance, she found another likely mark. This time it was a woman, a poor young thing who had her hands full trying to manage a squalling infant, while snapping desperate orders to three little kids who were happily ignoring her and climbing all over the antique-looking wooden fences that were intended to keep visitors off of the grass and shrubbery. Faith strolled up behind the woman, smiled approvingly at the ugly little embryo she was fussing with, and neatly slipped her hand into the purse hanging from mom's shoulder. Shielding her actions with both the woman's body and her own, she'd extracted a wad of bills in moments (leaving the lady her credit cards; she wasn't a total bitch), and then was on her way.

_Sorry, Lady, but if you're going to squirt out four brats that me and Buffy are going to end up fighting to protect, then you'd better be prepared to cover a few of my expenses._

That was two down, and she'd made it seem easy. Of course, it wasn't really that effortless; in fact she was so tense that she was trembling.

_Shit, I hate doing that!_ She glanced back, but no one was looking like they'd noticed her actions. She breathed a quiet sigh and kept her stride slow and unconcerned.

Faith figured her chances of pulling that kind of thing off were about four out of five, maybe a little better if, like here, she was able to pick targets who didn't really have their mind on what was going on around them. That still made it all too possible for someone to catch her in the act, and…. Well, okay, so it probably wouldn't matter anyway. If someone screamed and pointed at her, she would just take off. She could outrun anyone, outfight anyone, and even in a place like this she could be out of sight in seconds. It wasn't like they were going to organize a state-wide manhunt just to catch a pickpocket. Faith sighed, fingering the loot stuffed in her pocket while looking out at the highway.

_I guess it's just force of habit, being scared of getting caught, being afraid of what the cops would do to me, being afraid they'd find out I was a runaway and send me back to mom… again. _She shook her head violently, pushing aside memories of abuse, of her helpless screams that only made her mom's 'boyfriends' laugh harder, thrust harder, into an eleven-year-old girl….

She blinked, took a long, shuddering breath, then let it go.

_Fuck, why am I still reliving that? That was a long time ago. It was a different place, and I'm a different person now._ She was somewhat chagrined to realize that she was hunched over, with her arms folded over her stomach and her head bowed. With her teeth clenched she slowly and deliberately straightened up, lowering her arms so that they hung more or less naturally at her sides. _See? I'm okay. I'm not scared like I was back then, and I'm not scared of any of these losers, either. _

Just to prove that last part, she continued to linger there in plain view, despite the fact that eventually one of her victims was going to notice their missing cash. The tall man had seen her face, too, and would be able to put two and two together pretty quick. Despite that, she turned and spent a minute checking out the Indian merchants, taking her first close look at the locals. There were three of them, two women, one young and one old, and a middle-aged man, all dressed up in buckskins and beads, sitting in front of the small teepee. Faith frowned, looking at that.

_Uh, call me a Boston idiot, but weren't the Great Plains Indians the only ones who used those? I mean, I always thought these guys were kind of cool, so I actually paid a little attention when they came up in history class, and I could swear that most of the east and west coast tribes lived in huts, or lodges, or whatever._

She shrugged. She could be remembering it wrong, or maybe they had decided to give in to some common racial stereotypes in order to promote the trinket trade. At least these three actually did seem to be authentic natives; the color and texture of their hair, added to their strong facial features left little doubt that they were of Amerindian blood.

Her curiosity roused, she forgot about any possible danger from her victims and strolled towards the three. As she crossed the walkway, she caught a glimpse of Dean the truck driver, just emerging from the rest area building. Not wanting to risk an incident with him, she stepped right up to the tables of items the natives were selling, staring intently at the various objects and giving the man time to walk past. He probably saw her standing there, but she didn't look up, and fortunately he just kept on going towards his truck. Somewhat relieved that she wouldn't have to listen to him bitch her out, she'd started to turn and move on when a sudden gasp made her look up.

From this range Faith could see the details of the Native costumes the three were wearing. The women's hair was braided, the beadwork of their clothes was crafted of finely carved bone and horn, with elaborate designs picked out on the pale leather. The man's face was dabbed with several colors of paint, and his expression seemed to be set in stone as he endured a group of Asian teenagers posing beside him for their friend to snap a picture. The old woman was likewise patiently watching as varied sorts of white women picked over the wares spread on the table before her.

_Man, how can they stand this?_ She wondered. _I_ know _men didn't walk around every day with face paint on; but he has to dress up so that every idiot who walks by can get his picture taken with a 'real' Indian. How humiliating is that? And grandma over there is listening to these women babbling on about how 'authentic' all this jewelry is. I really doubt these guys ever made silver rings and cute little mini-dreamcatchers back in the old days, but since that's what the white folks buy, that's what they have to make._

Faith turned her gaze to the third one, the young woman, and she realized that this was the one who had gasped. She was pretty, the Slayer realized, and younger than she'd first thought; Eighteen or so, twenty at most… and she was staring at Faith with a look of pure terror in her dark eyes.

_Whoa; what's the deal, here? Did she see me lifting those tourist's cash a minute ago? _She glanced back along the walkway, noting that both the mother and the tall man were still in sight, and apparently oblivious to what she'd done. Faith turned back to the girl._ Maybe she thinks I'm gonna lift some of her junk, too. I guess it wouldn't exactly be the first time in history a white person screwed them over, huh? _

Trying to look as harmless as possible (even though she'd never thought to practice_ that_ before), she smiled.

"You've got some nice stuff here." Pointing at a beaded bracelet she fished a bill out of her pocket. "How much for that?" She figured that buying something might help change the girl's mind if she was about to start screaming for the cops, or park rangers, or whatever the hell kind of law hung out around here. The Indian girl, however, seemed not to even see the money Faith held. Instead, her eyes wide, she continued to stare right through the Slayer.

"H-he sees you…." The girl whispered, her voice shaking. Her dark eyes suddenly focused on Faith's, and she spoke again, this time with desperate intensity. "He sees you! He's watching you right now!"

Prickles ran up and down Faith's spine, and she couldn't help turning her head and doing another quick scan of the area. There was nothing; lots of people, yeah, but none of them seemed to be paying her any special attention at all.

She looked back at the native girl, ready to ask her just what the fuck was going on, but someone else beat her to it. The old woman, who Faith figured for the girl's grandmother, was leaning over and whispering angrily in a language the Slayer couldn't understand. It seemed likely that she was chewing out the younger woman for scaring a potential customer. The girl looked down meekly, but shook her head violently in reply to whatever grandma was saying. Faith was amazed to see tears running down the young woman's face, and when she glanced over at the elder of the two, she saw surprise mirrored there as well. With a quick, trembling sentence or two, the girl lurched to her feet, cast a last frightened look at Faith, and then hurried away, heading for a worn out pickup truck that was parked across the way.

The Slayer watched her go, cracking her knuckles meditatively.

_Well. That was wicked strange._ She thought. _I wonder what her deal was?_

The quiet clearing of a throat brought her attention back to the old woman.

"Please, forgive my niece." The wrinkled woman said. Her voice was rough, but her tone made it clear that she was doing her best to be reassuring. "She's a bit high-strung, but she meant no harm."

Faith cocked her head slightly to one side and regarded the woman uncertainly.

"Huh. What was the deal with that 'He's looking at you' stuff?"

"Ah…." The woman paused, and the Slayer suddenly caught a glimpse of something odd in those leathery features. She might be good at hiding it, but when she looked at Faith, the old lady had just a trace of fear in her eyes. The same kind of fear the girl had shown. "My grandfather was a powerful Shaman. I think that sometimes my niece believes that his legacy lives in her." The woman spread her hands and shrugged. "She claims to see things, to hear the spirits whispering to her; please pay her no mind. After all," She smiled thinly. "We all know there's nothing to those old superstitions."

Faith, who had on occasion had the living shit beaten out of her by someone's old 'superstitions', nodded in sage agreement and put on a blank expression.

"Yeah, nothin' to those old stories, huh grannie?" Looking back down at the stuff piled on the tables, she poked at a choker necklace made from narrow beads carved from some sort of bone. "Some of this stuff doesn't have a price. Am I supposed to barter with you or something?"

The old woman's eyes gleamed a little, and Faith thought she could almost see the dollar signs flashing in her eyes. Until, that is, the woman frowned, and glanced back over her shoulder. The Slayer followed her gaze, and saw that the niece was sitting in the front of their pickup truck, bent forward as if she were crying. The old lady turned back to where Faith was standing, and plastered a patiently fake smile on her lips.

"Since that child has disturbed you with her silliness, please choose something you like and take it; as a gift from us."

Faith smothered the grin that wanted to come when she heard the pain in the old woman's voice. Still, she'd be happy to snag something for free; that way she wouldn't have to part with any of her hard-stolen cash. Looking down at the stuff arrayed before her, her eyes were again drawn to that choker. It was really pretty, and anything that got between a vamp and her throat had to be a good thing….

_Nah,_ She thought to herself. _It's too expensive; the crone here is edging towards a heart attack just watching me look at it. _There were other things there, but most of them just looked too… cheesy. Little toy tomahawks for the kiddies to play with, some kind of psuedo-ceremonial rattles, feather clips to put in your hair…. Most of the stuff that looked decent was something she had no use for, like the little drums made of wood and animal hide, or the small rugs that were woven with intricate patterns. That pretty much just left the jewelry.

She edged to the side, where the table of bracelets, rings and necklaces was displayed. There was a lot of silver, a lot of turquoise, and while most of the stuff looked well-crafted, it somehow left her cold.

Faith sighed.

_Hell with it; just pick one and move on, there's other things to see and do. _

She reached forward, towards a small, cheap-looking bracelet… and her hand stopped in mid reach. She couldn't really say why she'd stopped, but there was something….

On the far corner of the table, sitting beside a bin full of genuine 'Spirit stones' gathered on long-hidden sacred ground (the sign said so), there was a small wooden box. It was full to the brim with tarnished bits of broken and bent jewelry that looked like it might have been gathered up off the side of the road somewhere. Both the box and its contents looked utterly unremarkable, but for some strange reason Faith found herself reaching for that box. She picked it up, hefted the weight in her hand for a moment, and then dumped it out on the table.

The old Indian woman started to protest, but the Slayer ignored her. She spread the bits and pieces out a little, still not sure what she was doing, or why. There didn't seem to be anything of note in the pile of debris, just junk, mixed in with stuff that a competent jeweler might or might not be able to repair. Faith gnawed at her lip for a few seconds, then held her hand over the bits, her palm a few inches above the table. Her hand drifted slowly back and forth, passing over rusted wristwatches, lengths of silver and gold chain, single earrings of various designs, a few battered buckles, a pair of odd-looking rings--

--Her hand stopped. There was something, almost like a faint warmth against her palm, when she held her hand over those rings. Still acting on impulse, she picked them up. Despite what she'd felt (or thought she'd felt), they were cool to the touch. The metal had an odd hue, though. It almost looked like a funky sort of gold, but the longer she looked at them-

"Copper." The old woman said, and Faith nearly jumped. She'd forgotten all about the Indian lady standing there. Looking up, she saw that the old woman was staring intently at the rings Faith was holding. The Slayer looked back at the items she was holding, and smirked.

_Well, at least these are cheap enough for her not to miss much; they're just a couple of pennies somebody melted down!_

They were kind of pretty, though. The two were similar in size, but where one was simply a plain metal band, the other sported a tiny etching of a bird. The workmanship involved was actually pretty amazing; she looked closer at the bird one, and found that there were many images inscribed on it, but it had been done in such a way that you could only see one at a time, and which one it was depended on the angle at which you were viewing it. The effect was almost like one of those holographic cards, where the picture changed as you moved it. In fact, as she turned the ring, the shifting images of the tiny bird almost made it seem as if it were in flight. Even stranger, as she turned the ring around and around, the movements the bird made didn't seem to be exactly repeating themselves… and as she continued to stare, she could have sworn that the image turned its head in mid-flight, and looked right back at her.

"How did _those_ get in--?"

The old woman's voice made Faith blink, and when she looked again, the bird was poised in mid-flight, looking straight ahead. She turned it around and around, but couldn't seem to find the angle that showed the bird looking at her again.

"So, how about I take these?" Faith looked up at the woman. "I mean, I know you said just one, but these are only copper, right?"

The Indian lady gave a 'harrumph' at that, but her heart didn't seem to be in it.

"Copper was precious to our peoples in olden times, thousands of years before the whites ever learned how to get iron and silver from the rock inside the earth. North of here, you could find nuggets of it in the streams, like gold." She was staring at the rings, and at Faith, and that tiny glint of fear that had been in her eyes earlier was back, and stronger than ever. "Some of the oldest things that man ever made were made from metal like that."

The Slayer had slipped the rings onto her left hand, the plain one on her ring finger, and the bird one on her middle. They fit perfectly, and she held up her hand to check it out.

"Uh, okaaay…." She hadn't really been asking for a history lesson, after all. "So, can I have 'em?"

The woman swallowed, then nodded firmly, her wrinkled hands clutching at each other.

"Yes, please take them as our gift to you."

Faith grinned.

"Cool; thanks!"

With a wave of her newly be-ringed hand, she turned and headed towards the entrance to the rest area building. The woman seemed happy to see her go.

* * * * *

Once inside, Faith changed her mind about making use of the facilities. One thing that hitchhiking had taught her was that a bathroom, no matter where it might be, was infinitely preferable to using a stand of bushes beside the highway. After that business was dealt with, she spent a minute checking herself in the mirror over the sinks. Her hair was in its usual state; a semi-wild mane spilling past her shoulders, but it still looked okay.

_At least I'm not like Buffy, thank god. She must spend an hour every day figuring out how to do something different with her hair. Me, I run a brush through it in the morning and call it done._ She did take the time to redo her lipstick, but that wasn't purely a vanity thing; the better she looked the shorter the wait would be for her next ride. Regarding her image, she smiled at herself. _And damn, I do look pretty good, don't I? Maybe with this cash I lifted I can buy another set or two of decent clothes when I get back. Going by what Giles gives me to live on, those Watchers must expect me to live on white rice and only wear sackcloth._

And that was almost literally true; the Librarian did give Faith a weekly allowance, but even with the long-term deal that had been worked out with the hotel where she was living, it was barely enough to feed her. She just couldn't figure out what Giles was thinking. Did he want to control Faith by forcing her to live week to week, with never enough cash to finance a trip out of Sunnydale? Was the oh-so-mighty Watcher's Council so strapped for funding that they couldn't even support their premier weapon against the monsters? Or was it something simpler? Did Giles, who had never actually had live with and support Buffy, as most Watchers did their Slayers, (as Faith's first Watcher, Ms. Northam, had done) simply not understand how much it cost Faith to feed her ultra-high-performance body? Could a Watcher, supposedly one of the most well-informed supernatural experts in the world, simply not know what he was doing? That was kind of hard to believe, but why else were things happening this way?

As it was, with the hundred and fifty dollars she received every Monday, she barely broke even most weeks. It sounded like a lot; it was certainly more than she'd lived on back before the Slayer gig had turned up, but in truth it wasn't enough. Seventy-five dollars a week went to pay for her crappy living quarters. The remaining seventy-five was hardly sufficient to keep her fed, and that was with Faith using some seriously creative ways of obtaining sustenance. Some shoplifting was usually involved; when nothing else was available, half a loaf of bread served to fill her stomach, some sugar provided the calories she needed (she stole the little packets from various places by the handful), and a pint of milk to wash it down at least made it_ seem_ like a real meal. She was fairly sure that the demise of the 'All you can eat' breakfast bar at the local Denny's had been entirely her fault, but hey; she'd taken them at their word, and for a couple of weeks that place had been a regular post-patrol stop.

Beyond that, Faith still had just the three sets of clothes which she'd brought with her to Sunnydale, and all of them were showing real signs of wear. The leather pants she was wearing now were the only ones she owned; the only thing she had that could survive repeated anti-vampire patrols, and even they were starting to get sort of ragged.

Faith leaned closer to the mirror, staring into her reflected eyes.

_You know, I could just sort of mention all of this to Giles. Maybe he doesn't know he's practically starving me to death. Maybe, if I told him I needed more cash, he'd be happy to see that the Council upped the 'weekly subsistence benefit', or whatever the hell they call it._

Yeah, maybe. More likely, they'd just see it as Faith making excuses, as her causing even more problems, and being less of a Slayer than Buffy was. The girl looking back at her from the mirror's depths suddenly looked paler, her eyes harder.

After the truth had come out concerning the circumstances of her arrival in Sunnydale, one of the first things Giles had done was take Faith aside and explain to her how wrong it had been for her to lie about her Watcher's death. Apparently the folks in England were not at all happy with her failure to keep Ms. Northam safe from Kakistos; they figured that if someone had to die fighting a vamp, it was supposed to be the Slayer. The librarian, too, thought she'd been cowardly to run, and irresponsible to lead the big vampire to Buffy, who apparently had enough troubles of her own without having to deal with Faith's.

Not that he had said it in those words; he'd tried his best to be gentle, to talk his way around actually calling her a miserable excuse for a chosen one, but Gile's own disapproval of her was very evident. Plainly it was his opinion that only someone like Buffy, who could do no wrong, was fit to be a Slayer. Of course, nobody ever mentioned that Buffy herself had lost her first Watcher, back in Los Angles, and it was her stupidity in not killing Angel right after he lost it that had resulted in the death of that Miss Calendar person, but it had been obvious from the beginning that everyone treated the older Slayer differently than Faith.

_And did they really think I needed reminding of how badly I fucked up with Kakistos? Did they really believe that whatever 'punishment' they threatened me with could hold a candle to what I already put myself through, every time I remember how she died?_

Suddenly, and without warning, something occurred to her, and she stopped breathing for a moment.

_Wait a second…._ It was painful; the abrupt realization of a thought that had been lurking, unformed, for quite a while now. _Is that it? Is the reason Giles is in charge of two Slayers now not because they trust him so much, but because they really don't trust me at all?_ Her fist was clenched so hard that it was white, the new rings shining as she pounded her hand gently on the edge of the sink._ Fuck me; that is it, isn't it? The Council doesn't trust me not to get another Watcher killed, so they're leaving me with one who has another Slayer to take care of him. No wonder Giles doesn't give a crap about what happens to me; they've already written me off as a lost cause._

She stared at herself in the mirror, and now it wasn't to admire what she saw there; it was to reinforce what she'd known for a long, long time now.

No one else cared; no matter what they said, or promised, or pretended to feel, no one in the world cared about her. If even the people behind this whole 'sacred destiny as the Slayer' deal didn't give a shit about her anymore, then who did she have?

Buffy? It sure didn't seem that way, now did it?

No, it was all back down to what she'd had before, to what she'd been left with long before any of this 'Slayer' stuff had been dumped on her.

The only person she could really count on for anything was herself. When everyone else left her, or turned on her, or… died on her, Faith would always be there.

She nodded, acknowledging that fundamental truth, and the dark haired girl in the mirror gravely returned it. Her steady eyes met Faith's own, as if to say: _Yep, that's right. I've got your back._

It wasn't much, but sometimes you just had to take what you could get.

Along about then, a group of four girls around her own age came into the bathroom, their high-pitched voices resounding from the tiled walls as they giggled over some joke. Faith turned her head to look at them, and they abruptly went quiet as they saw her standing there. They were dressed in expensive, trendy clothes; no doubt their parents spoiled them rotten, just like Buffy's mom did for her own little princess. The girls came the rest of the way inside, pointedly not looking directly at the Slayer, but stealing glances from the corners of their eyes. The looks they exchanged, and the little grins on their faces, proved that they found her appearance terribly amusing.

Faith ignored them, as she always did when she encountered their type. Shouldering her pack once more, she headed back out into the building's central area. Passing through the doorway, she heard whispers from behind her.

"-looks like a runaway, doesn't she?"

"A junkie, more like."

"Just white trash; god, did you see her clothes!?"

Faith kept walking.

_Laugh it up, you bitches. And if I ever see a vamp about to rip your pretty little necks out, we'll see if you remember how funny this was. I know_ I_ will._

* * * * *


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

See Chapter One for Disclaimer  
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The rest stop's large main room held dozens of snack and coffee machines, some comfy chairs to relax in, and some simple, colorful maps on the walls that showed the way to the area's tourist attractions. Scattered about the room were glass display cases, which contained various Indian artifacts from the region. Faith spent a few minutes looking at them after she used some of her newly acquired money to get a couple of chocolate bars from a vending machine. She wasn't the chocolate fanatic Buffy was, but candy bars were definitely a good source of calories for the ol' slaying machine. A can or two of Jolt cola would have been welcome too, but she couldn't find a machine that stocked it. She settled for a Pepsi, working her way through it between bites of chocolate, idly wandering through displays of old arrowheads and knife blades that had been chipped from local flint.

_Man, these guys must have been real bad-asses, taking out bears and mountain lions -and each other-with nothing but this crap and their bare hands._ A tomahawk, still deadly-looking even though it had to be a couple of hundred years old, made her flash back to one of her favorite movies; 'The last of the mohicans', the one with Daniel Day-Lewis in it. The fight scenes in that, with native warriors using both knives and tomahawks, still gave her chills every time she saw it. Not to mention the very studly guys that populated the entire film. Of course, those weapons had been made of steel, and this one had a head of chipped flint, but she was sure that it would still be no fun at all to be on the receiving end of it. In fact, staring at the ancient weapon literally made her hands itch with the desire to hold it. Sternly repressing the urge to do something as stupidly blatant as smashing the display case glass, she turned away.

Finishing her candy bar, she wadded up the wrapper and tossed it into a convenient garbage receptacle, along with the empty soda can. There were only a handful of other people hanging out in the room with her, but given her mood it still felt a little too crowded. Opposite the main entrance was a pair of large glass doors that opened out onto a sort of rear patio area, and she headed that way. Pushing through them to the outside, she found herself in a much quieter space, with scattered wood and concrete benches, and some planters holding flowers and dwarf trees. Aside from herself, the area was deserted. With a sigh of relief, she dropped her pack on a handy bench and sank down beside it. Reaching into her jacket pocket, she pulled out the cigarettes she'd taken from Dean's truck.

_Blech; Marlboros. These'll probably make me sick to my stomach._ She shook one out of the pack and put it to her lips, lighting it with Dean's cheap, disposable lighter. Taking a deep draw, she braced herself for a fit of coughing; after all, it had been months since she'd smoked anything, let alone one of these nasties. To her surprise, it didn't happen. Her lungs and the toxic fumes seemed to get along just fine, and she breathed the smoke out slowly._ Huh. Well, I guess if I can survive getting pounded on by an eight-foot tall vampire, then these little things can't hurt me._ That was the good news. The bad news was, the expected lift from the nicotine hitting her system was pretty damn faint, and she looked at the cigarette she held with disappointment. _Damn; the Slayer metabolism strikes again, ruining my fun. _She took another drag, stretching her legs out and crossing them at the ankles. _Well, at least it helps a little; besides, it gives me something to do while I sit here like a lump. _A bitter smile tugged at her lips._ And of course, it's one more way for me to be 'bad', and show Buffy and the rest what I think of 'em. _She closed her eyes for a second, trying to appreciate the scale of just how pathetic that was. _Yeah, I'm really showing them, ain't I? I stormed out of town… after I stopped and left word. I'm stealing and smoking and all that bad-girl stuff… but only after I got a hundred miles away from anyplace that Buffy might happen to see me._

God; and here she'd thought that getting out of town would cheer her up. She opened her eyes and looked around for something, anything, that would distract her from her thoughts. To the left of where she was sitting, the back wall of the rest stop building was lined with promotional posters like she'd seen out in front. These were just more of the same, and she started to look away, but-

Amazing. There was actually one there for the town of Sunnydale. The bright text read: 'Steeped in native folklore, Sunnydale is home to a host of natural wonders. Come and wander our lush forests, explore the many beautiful caverns and nearly endless water-carved tunnels, and enjoy the hospitality of our long-time residents. They're looking forward to meeting you!' The picture of the Mayor standing in front of a small waterfall certainly looked inviting; despite being in a neat suit the man's wide smile looked friendly and cheerful as anything. Too bad he didn't know his wonderful little town was pretty much a literal hell on earth.

Faith drew smoke into her lungs, then flicked the ash onto the ground beside her as she contemplated finding a marker or something and coloring out the m in 'meeting you' on the poster. That would sure make the thing more accurate, wouldn't it? Doing her best to ignore the childish impulse, she turned her head.

To her right, out beyond the edge of the patio area, a narrow lane of mowed grass separated the place from a wall of trees. Gazing at the dappled shadows that were visible within the woods, smelling the cool, green scents the wind brought to her nose, she pushed Sunnydale from her mind.

_That looks nice, and it smells good, too. Too bad I'm a city girl, or I might go check it out. _She'd just turned back and raised the cigarette to her lips when a flash of movement caught her eye. Looking through the wide glass doors into the building, and out through the glass wall in front, she saw a State Trooper patrol car just pulling up.

_Uh oh._

She supposed that it could be coincidence… actually it probably was coincidence; cops tended to check up on these places pretty frequently. On the other hand, she had committed a couple of crimes right outside, not to mention a lot of similar stuff back in Boston. There was also the matter of a few assaults, both there and on the road between Massachusetts and California; nothing major, just a couple of confrontations that had ended up with an overly amorous man or two being sent to the hospital… and her description being sent to the local law. If the boys out front took her into custody, even just for questioning, and then bothered to check her files, things could get kind of interesting.

Not to mention the fact that Buffy, Giles, and the others would likely find out about it, and she'd look like a total loser; that would be hard for her pride to take. Taking a final draw, she tossed the butt of her cigarette down and stepped on it as she stood.

_Okay, I guess maybe a little walk in the woods isn't such a bad idea after all._

Idly, pretending that nothing at all was on her mind, she shouldered her pack and strolled towards the trees. She could have run and been there in a few seconds, but the funny thing about running was that it tended to draw a cop's attention. Keeping that in mind, she maintained her slow pace as she headed for the sanctuary of the forest. _I'll just duck in here for a few minutes, wait for them to move on, and then go back to the highway and catch a ride. Monterey is only a few hours away, and a couple of days there will really help me chill out. I should be able to find some place to crash, now that I've got some money, and a place like that will have some real parties; Sunnydale is just way too dead for me._ She wrinkled her nose at that. _Ha; dead. I made a funny._

Or not.

Halfway to safety, she hazarded a glance back over her shoulder. If she'd been hoping that luck would favor her, she was sadly disappointed. A pair of uniformed State Troopers was just coming through the doors and out onto the patio, and they were both looking directly at her. She looked away, and despite the spike of adrenaline that set her heart to racing and her hands inching towards the stake thrust through the back of her belt, she still managed to keep her stride slow and even as she approached the forest. Until, that is, a voice barked out that word every street ganger dreads.

"Freeze!" Her hearing had already gone hyper-acute when she'd kicked into combat mode a few seconds earlier, and now her ears brought her the unmistakable sound of two guns clearing their holsters. "Stand where you are, miss!"

She didn't turn around, but she did come to a stop. She stopped for exactly as long as it took for her to extend her arms out to either side, to spread her fingers wide and show them that she had no weapons… and then she ran like hell.

_Fuck, fuck, Fuck!_

It was funny; she'd expected to be pissed-off. Here she was, an honest-to-god super hero, someone fated to fight and die defending these morons from monsters they couldn't even imagine, and they were going to arrest her for lifting a few bucks from some rich tourists. They were going to lock her away for some piddly little shit like that, and here she was already sentenced to the biggest act of 'public service' anyone had ever seen.

She should be angry, but she wasn't; she was terrified. In an instant, all the experiences of the last few months fell away. She wasn't strong, anymore, wasn't a Slayer, anymore; she was a scared girl, running for her life. Faith couldn't help it; the sound of that cop's voice had sent her straight back to those endless days and nights in Boston, where she and the rest of the street kids had lived in utter fear of a certain group of the city's finest. The folks in Los Angles thought they had it bad? Their boys in blue had nothing on Boston's uniformed thugs. Sure, it wasn't all of them; it wasn't even most of them… but the few dozen that were bad were really bad. They somehow felt it was their duty to keep the streets safe; especially from the 'undesirable elements'.

Faith had found out that teenage addicts fit into that category one night when two cops had found her huddled in the entrance to a drainage tunnel. There, out of sight of any respectable citizens, they'd taken turns beating her with their batons, and kicking her with their nice, shiny boots. They'd spit on her, and laughingly joked that if she'd been any less filthy looking they'd have given her a good fucking as well. They hadn't arrested her; it hadn't been about her breaking any laws… it had been about power. The power they had, and she didn't. As it was, she'd gotten off pretty easily. She'd recovered from the cracked ribs in a couple of weeks, and her nose had healed so well that today you couldn't even tell it had been broken. Other people she'd known hadn't been as lucky.

So now, even though she could have turned around and obliterated both of these men without any effort at all, it never occurred to her to do it. All she did was make sure they didn't have an excuse to shoot her in the back, and then she ran.

Of course, old reflexes or no, the fact remained that Faith was different now. In the old days they probably would have caught her pretty quickly; now, they barely had time to realize that she was moving before she was in among the trees. Once there, though, she managed to run for less than ten yards before tripping over something she couldn't see, and sprawling with painful abruptness headlong into a drift of dry, brittle leaves. Coughing and sneezing from the dust and grit that had gotten into her mouth and nose, Faith lunged to her feet and stumbled further into the undergrowth. There didn't seem to be any clear passage through the foliage; she was forced to push her way through stands of big weeds, or thickets of bushes whose branches almost seemed to have been woven together in a deliberate barrier against intruders. She was panting, her brain and body still filled to overflowing with a frantic need to get away. It couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes of fighting her way forward before she fell again, this time against the trunk of a huge tree. Faced with more of the apparently endless thickets barring the way forward, she rolled to one side, pressing her back against the solid trunk and looking back the way she'd come.

_Man, this place looked so much nicer before I was actually in it._

Faith couldn't see much farther than she could extend her hand, but she could clearly hear the two men pursuing her. They weren't far away; she probably hadn't made it more than a hundred yards or so into the forest.

_Damn it! I can take these guys; guns or no guns. They won't see me until they come through these weeds, and then they'll be close enough to reach. And if I can reach them then I can trash 'em._

The only problem with that was the fact that if she so much as laid a hand on a cop, this went from a two-man search to a state-wide operation. One thing the authorities didn't take lightly was someone roughing up their uniformed minions. Sure, Faith would get away from these two, but if at some later point she was caught, she'd be looking at not just theft charges, but assault, resisting arrest; maybe even attempted murder.

Frustrated, desperate and angry at herself for being so scared of mere human beings, she slammed her left hand down against a big exposed root by her side.

_I don't want to be here! All I want is to get away!_

She slammed her left hand down again, harder this time-

--And nearly jumped out of her skin when the tree, the earth, even the very air around her reverberated with a vast, nearly subsonic _Thoom!_ It was just like the one she'd felt a little while earlier, when she'd first set foot on the asphalt of the rest area. Now, like then, it wasn't really something she heard, but it went through her like the resonance of a vast drum being struck. Before she had time to do more than wonder what the hell was going on, there was a sudden, sharp pain in the palm of her right hand. She snatched it away from where it had been resting on the lower, sloped portion of the tree trunk, and even as she did so the stinging vanished. She glanced at her palm, but aside from some slightly oozing scratches she'd picked up during her scramble through the brush, there was nothing wrong with it. A swishing, rustling sound drew her gaze upwards, and she stared with blank incomprehension at the vast network of branches high above her. For some reason, even though they'd been utterly still just moments earlier, the upper reaches of the forest were now in wild motion. The sound was nearly strong enough to drown out the voices of the policemen a short distance away, but Faith was still able to hear it when they suddenly began to shout.

"-sus Christ! Ray, get this offa me!"

"What the hell? Man, how did you get wrapped up in--?"

The Slayer was doing her best to press herself backward into the solid wood of the tree. Whatever special sense she and Buffy shared that warned of the supernatural, it was in overdrive right now. She couldn't quite see anything besides the trees, but she could feel the presence of… something.

More than one something, actually. Somewhere far off to her left and right, she heard rustles, as if something large was moving through the forest, heading towards the still shouting State Troopers. Throwing anxious glances to either side, Faith caught the barest glimpse of movement. She blinked, then rubbed her eyes, and by the time she looked again it was gone.

_There was something there, something my eyes wouldn't see._

Not couldn't; wouldn't.

"Calm down! C'mon, just unwrap 'em. They're only thorns."

"BullSHIT they're just thorns! These things are hanging on to me!"

The panic in their voices was growing fast, and it would have been funny to hear such big, tough men acting so scared, if only she hadn't been right there with them.

"-Aaaahhh! Ants! There's ants crawling all over me!"

Something lightly brushed Faith's shoulder, and by reflex she threw herself away from it even as she looked to see what it had been.

_Nothing. It was just a branch._

One of the drooping branches from the tree behind her had moved with the breeze or whatever, and touched her was all. That was all… except for the path that she saw just beyond the big tree, leading off through the woods and away from the highway, the rest area, and the cops. In an instant she'd made it to her feet once more and sprinted down the escape route.

Sure, if Giles were there he'd probably be staring at her with stern disapproval; after all, she was leaving those guys at the mercy of whatever it was that had suddenly manifested from the deceptively pretty forest. On the other hand, they were cops, they had guns, and hey; they'd been chasing her. Somehow, her sympathy for them just wasn't as great as it should have been.

Now that she wasn't having to bulldoze her way through a wall of vegetation, she was making good time. The path was full of twists and turns, but it was clear, and she ran along it at her maximum speed for what had to be several miles before she even thought about stopping. By that time, whatever the weird disturbance had been was far, far behind her, leaving only a typical patch of woods. At least, it was what she assumed a typical bunch of woods was; she'd never actually been in any before. Metro Boston wasn't big on trees in groups of more than three or four, leastways not the part she was from. Slowing to a jog, then to a walk, she took a look around, breathing heavily from her run.

_Crap, I guess I need to start doing some running along with the combat training. A measly five miles or so of running full-out, and here I am all tired and out of breath._

Not only that, but her feet hurt. Or maybe 'hurt' was the wrong word. They definitely felt odd, though; sort of… half numb? Shuffling her feet a little to try and wake them up, she turned her head and gave her surroundings a good once-over. Not surprisingly, there were trees.

Lots of trees.

Lots of_ big_ trees, like, a couple of hundred feet high.

Trees with flat, maple-type leaves, pine-type trees with sharp-scented needles that surrounded her with a powerful but not unpleasant smell. Once she got used to it, she could pick out a lot of scents, and a lot of sounds, too. Her hyper senses, long since adjusted to the stenches and noise of good ol' civilization, were foundering a bit as they tried to figure out what was going on in this new environment in which she found herself. The mid-afternoon sun was sending shafts of yellow light slanting down through the branches and leaves, birds were singing, strange little insect sounds made a quiet backdrop of chirps and buzzes. Enveloped in a sea of strangeness, Faith folded her arms across her stomach and she turned slowly in place. Her eyes scanned the trees warily as she thought back on what had happened when she'd first entered the forest.

_Okay, even a total dumb-ass would know that something unnatural was going on back there, but I felt something, too. And what I saw…._ Her eyes had sort of skipped over it at the time, as if it wasn't something a human being was meant to see at all. Faith wasn't just a human, though; she was a Slayer, and the longer she picked at that memory, the more she prodded it, the more she recalled.

_I _did_ see something. It was like… I don't know, like a swirl of green leaves, or a glimpse of antlers and fur, or maybe a pile of rocks with green stuff growing all over them, freaky as that sounds. _She switched her pack to her other shoulder, still looking around uneasily. _Maybe it was all three of those at once, or none of them. All I'm sure of is that it was alive, somehow. There was a presence there._

Just as there was a presence near her now.

Faith felt the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck slowly stand on end as she pivoted in place, her gaze darting here and there in the unfamiliar environs. It was hard to know where to look, what to look for. Her eyes were actually hurting as she strained to separate all the odd shapes and shadows into something recognizably threat or non-threat.

Nothing. She couldn't see anything there, just trees and ground and little weeds and bigger weeds and flying bugs, crawling bugs, birds and squirrels and a little brown mouse-type thing over there that had paused in the midst of walking along a rotten log to stare back at her. Nothing at all weird or supernatural or demon-shaped was there… except she could still feel it.

Which was more than she could say for her feet. Rubbing her hand across the back of her neck in an effort to make the tingling little hairs there lay down and behave, she looked down at her shoes. They were heavy, half-boot no-name shit-kickers, and she really liked them. Sure, they weren't Docs or anything, but they worked for getting her around.

So how come, right now and with all the other crap that was going on, was she suddenly absolutely certain that those shoes were wrong?

Faith glanced around one more time. Whatever it was that was here, for the moment it seemed content just to watch. The Slayer turned around and around, even looking straight up in case 'it' might be dangling from a branch high overhead.

Still nothing.

_Well. Maybe it's nothing that's willing to take me on. Maybe it saw-- _She shook her head ruefully and sighed. _Yeah, maybe it saw how I was running away from those two cops, just about two seconds away from wetting myself. Of _course_ it's afraid of me!_

That reminded her of something, and her head came up. The cops…. Those things she'd seen, or thought she'd seen earlier; they'd gone for the Troopers, not her.

_Not only that, the things went past me, to go after them. Why would they do that?_

And while she was wondering about things like that, what the hell was wrong with her feet? Suddenly unable to stand it another moment, she plopped straight down on the ground and jerked at the laces of a shoe. Nearly all the feeling had left the foot inside, and she could only think that maybe she'd stepped on something that had gone right through the heavy soles and poisoned her.

_Or maybe I'm allergic to something that was in all that leaf crap I accidentally snorted when I fell down before._

She got the first one unlaced, and yanked it off to reveal her bare foot. A quick check showed no bites, or blood, and no flesh turning funny colors. She tried moving her toes and they obediently wiggled back at her. Still not sure what the deal might be, she started on the other shoe.

_No, it can't be an allergy; I'm a Slayer. We don't get sick, and we get over any allergies as soon as we're called._ She remembered being surprised when Buffy mentioned that she'd gotten some kind of vicious super-flu the year before, which had ended up with her being hospitalized and having to kill an invisible monster. Faith still couldn't figure out how the other girl had managed to catch anything at all, much less something that had actually left her staggering and semi-conscious. _I wonder if maybe all the hellmouth energy in these parts might get into germs and stuff sometimes, too. Sort of a magical plague? I suppose something like that might get lucky and take a bite out of even a Slayer. And Buffy did say that once her body had a chance to figure out what was happening she got well in a hurry. Even survived drinking a Super-flu cocktail of the stuff._

The other shoe came off, and she checked out her foot. Still no visible sign of damage or anything. In fact, now that they were both exposed to the forest air, they felt fine. Faith frowned, and then, acting on an impulse she didn't really understand, slid her foot off of her leg and let it rest on the ground. She hadn't wanted to get them dirty; the thought of muddy feet inside her shoes was truly disgusting, but….

It felt good. The path was dirt, yes, but it was smooth, hard-packed dirt, and the cool surface was strangely comforting against the sole of her foot. Taking her shoes in her hands, she stood up. Looking down at her feet, she took a few experimental steps. Despite her misgivings about the whole thing, her feet seemed quite happy with the situation.

_Okay, this has gone a ways past just being weird._

Untying the flap to her shoulder pack, she stuffed her shoes inside, then resecured it. Throughout this whole process, her hidden watcher (not Watcher) had been content to observe. She could still feel its presence, but there was no other sign that it was there. Faith rubbed at her nose, which was still feeling abused from the leaf-dust incident.

_All right. Okay then._ One more look around, and then she turned back up the path._ This thing has to lead somewhere, right? I'll just see where it goes._ A playful little grin tugged at her lips, and she settled her pack into place over one shoulder. _And if this creepy peeper wants to keep staring at me from the bushes or wherever, the bastard had better have some serious legs on him._

Faith started forwards, moving at a walk, her eyes down as she watched for anything sharp (or disgusting; after all, there were _animals_ and stuff out here, and they probably shit all over the place), but the path remained smooth and obstacle-free. Feeling more confident, she moved smoothly into an easy lope. She'd been worried about running barefoot; not only was there the fear of stepping on something, but there was the issue of traction. And of simply hurting her feet by pounding them against the ground over and over without a shoe to support them.

People wore shoes for a reason, right?

But so far, everything was fine. So fine, in fact, that she found herself picking up the pace almost without realizing it. Her breathing came deep and steady, and her feet found their way unerringly along the twists and turns of the path. Indeed, it almost felt like she was running on a rubber mat or something; the path seemed to feed energy into her through the soles of her feet through a rebound that propelled her forward almost effortlessly. Soon she was moving through the forest with a swiftness and smoothness that was almost magical. Faith stared straight ahead, her intense focus turning the walls of foliage to either side into green blurs, and the path into an endless tunnel through which she flowed at the speed of thought.

Up, down, around and over, the path wound its way into the foothills of the Santa Lucia Range. Up, down, and around; but mostly up. Gaining elevation steadily, Faith ran; caught up in the movement, half lost in an almost trance-like state. Without thought, without design or purpose, she ran, and the earth seemed to sound beneath her bare feet with every stride; a steady drumbeat that was felt instead of being heard.

An endless time later, she slowed; first to a jog, then to a walk. She wasn't sure why, just that it had seemed right. And just around the next turning of the path, which looked exactly like a few hundred others she'd run past, she found the spring.

There was a pool there, a roundish depression in a big shelf of rock sticking out of the side of a hill, and the pool was filled to overflowing with clear water. Faith climbed up a series of weathered stone ledges, taking in the scene. The little pond wasn't more than ten feet across, surrounded by mossy rocks and tall, thick grass. Trees overhung it, their branches making faint patterns against the darkening sky.

That caught her attention.

_It's dark already; or close enough to it._ That surprised her. Last time she'd seen the sun clearly, back where she'd taken her shoes off, it had been high up in the sky, hours and hours away from setting. Now, though, her eyes had slipped into nearly full nightvision mode without her noticing, just to let her see in the quickly darkening woods. She'd lost hours while running, without being aware of it.

_I wonder how far I've come?_ She wondered. _I think I was making pretty good time there, but it wasn't in a straight line. For all I know the highway might be just over the hill._

It was possible, but she doubted it. Faith wasn't certain how she knew, but somewhere deep inside was a certainty that she'd traveled a very long way indeed. Despite that, she wasn't particularly tired, but she was thirsty.

Very thirsty.

Letting her pack slide off her shoulder and onto the ground, she padded silently along the water's edge. It really was clear; even with the darkness gathering thick under the trees she could see the pebbles and stuff at the bottom, several feet below the pool's surface. At the far end, water bubbled up from a hole in the rock and then poured down a little incline until it reached the little pond. Since the surface it flowed over was green with moss, she stretched a little so that her cupped hands could get it from where it first came out of the ground; she was hoping it would be cleaner, there. When she put her hands into the flow, she was bit surprised by how cold it was. It felt like ice-melt, and when she brought her hands to her mouth a lot of it ran down her arms and chin in cold little rivulets.

What she managed to get down her throat, however, really was the best thing she'd ever drunk in her life.

Seriously. It wasn't a thing like the nasty, crud-tinged, metallic-tasting stuff that came out of a sink faucet. This was cold, and pure, and…. Well, it just tasted real, somehow. More so than anything else she'd ever experienced. She drank another few handfuls, then stepped back, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.

_This place isn't half-bad. I mean, I know there's probably snakes and ticks and spiders and stuff all over the place, but so far…._

It was strange, actually, and the strangest part of it all was that it all seemed so familiar. It was like, maybe she'd been here before? No, that was impossible, but the whole deal was tinged with a feeling of unreality; or maybe it was just a _different_ reality, where things like this were normal, and places like Sunnydale, or even Boston, were the freaky exception. With her throat still feeling all tingly from the water, Faith walked slowly around the far side of the pool. The green stems and leaves of the big weeds (anything that wasn't grass or a tree was a weed, so far as she was concerned) grew close to the water's edge there, so she had to step carefully. A slip here would mean falling into the pool, and….

Faith stopped, staring down at the water. Carefully, she extended one foot, just dipping her toes in an inch or so. It was cold, but not as much as she would have expected, given the iciness of the spring. Pulling her foot back, the Slayer slowly started undoing her belt. A quick dunking in the pool was suddenly looking like a great idea. It would be cold, yeah, but she was tough. Besides, it couldn't hurt to cleanse herself, both figuratively and literally, before entering into the next portion of the….

"What the _fuck_ am I doing?!"

Faith deliberately took a step back from the water's edge, hurriedly refastening her jeans and buckling her belt back into place. She'd been all set to shuck her clothes and jump into some ice-water, and she had no idea why.

Or rather, she'd been all set to do it, and it hadn't been her idea.

_It sure seemed like it was my idea a minute ago, though. _She thought. _But now that I've snapped out of whatever trance that was, it just seems stupid._ She rubbed her hands up and down her arms nervously. Even with the jacket on she felt a little cold, and this was southern California! Sure, it was November, and she'd gained maybe a couple thousand feet or so in elevation since the beginning of her hike, but…. _Well, okay; I guess that explains why I'm cold. But it doesn't explain what I'm doing here, barefoot and all rarin' to get naked and dive into this water, does it?_

Resolutely, she walked the rest of the way around the liquid-filled depression in the rock, back to where she'd set down her pack.

_Things are getting a little too freaky around here, even for me. I'll just head on up this trail, get to wherever it goes, and catch a ride out of here. After this, a city, a town; hell, even a quickie-mart will look like heaven._

She looked for where the path continued on past the spring, but despite her night-seeing eyes, there was no sign of it. Faith stood there for a few moments, feeling more than a little lost.

_Um. I was sure that it kept going past here; that there was another trail that went out the other side of this place, further on up the hill. _Cracking her knuckles, she prowled along the upper side of the shelf, but there was nothing._ I guess I was wrong._ She shrugged to herself. _All right; I'll just head back the way I came. It'll be a long walk in the dark, but those cops'll be long gone by now, and-_

Turning to where the rock ledges led down to the path she'd used to reach the place, Faith froze. There was nothing there. No break at all in the foliage that surrounded the pool, no path visible at the base of the rocks leading back down the slope; nothing but dense, shadowy forest for as far as her eyes could see.

Not only that, but the watching presence was back, and this time it had friends. Faith slowly set down her pack again, though what she really wanted to do was throw it as hard and far as she could; anything to relieve the mounting frustration inside her. Looking around, she saw nothing but the dark trunks and branches of the surrounding trees, heard nothing but the quiet burbling of the spring behind her. Despite that, she knew there was something there; quite a few somethings, actually. Like before the watchers didn't seem anxious to attack, they were just… there.

"Fine." Her voice, rough and strained, sounded strange in the quiet. "You guys just keep doing whatever you're doing; have a blast with that, okay?" She shook her head resignedly, then plopped herself down on a bare section of rock, opposite where the spring fed into the pool. "I'll just sit here and wait for you to get your shit together. You decide you want to rumble, I'm up for it."

A couple of minutes crawled by, with Faith doing her best to act all casual and unconcerned, while the… what? Creatures? Entities? Whatever; they just sat out there, either invisible or so well-hidden that it was practically the same thing, and all they did was watch and wait.

The Slayer sat there, staring fixedly at the water bubbling up out of the ground, her surroundings tinted with the soft blues and purples that her nightvision layered on top of everything.

_Maybe they're waiting for me to fall asleep; is that it?_ Being ignored by Buffy and shunned by everyone else had at least given her plenty of time to watch lots of ancient movies on her crappy television, and in one of them something similar had happened. _So this might be a 'Body Snatchers' thing. Maybe they want to create a 'pod-Faith', to take my place and go back to Sunnydale pretending to be me. _Raising her head slightly, she addressed the darkness.

"Hey, guys! If that's it, then you can just go ahead and do it, okay?" She tucked her bare feet underneath her as she sat, adjusting her position until she was as comfortable as one was likely to get while sitting on a slab of rock. "C'mon, it's okay, really. Pod Faith can go back there and get shit on for awhile, and I'll just hang out here and eat berries and stuff. I'll run barefoot in the woods and strip totally nekkid for you, too. Just so long as somebody tells me what's supposed to be going on, I'm fine with it. That work for you?"

Apparently it didn't, because there was still no movement from the watchers. She sighed. It would have been nice if something had come within arm's reach, something she could Slay, but no such luck.

"Okay, then; screw you too."

It was looking to be a long, long night. Faith stared at the water some more. She listened to the light wind whispering through the high branches overhead, she saw a bat zig-zag it's way between the trees, gulping bugs out of the air as it flew. She tapped her fingers on her knees and hummed to herself for a while, but it was hard to concentrate on the tune with a bunch of invisible somethings staring at her like this.

_Damn, I wish I had my walkman._

It was just about the only luxury she'd managed to save from the gear Ms. Northam had bought for her, but in her rush to get out of Sunnydale she'd forgotten to bring it along.

_Man, if that bitch who cleans up at the motel gets into my room and steals that, I'm seriously going to beat the shit outta her._

Time passed. Slowly. After another whole ten minutes or so had crawled by, Faith's stomach growled, and she remembered the second chocolate bar she'd stuck in he jacket pocket. Reaching inside, she pulled out the bar. It wouldn't exactly fill her up or anything, but unless she was prepared to go and run down a bunny or something (and to eat it raw), there wasn't a lot of choice. Peeling away the silvery foil wrapper, she took a bite.

--And nearly gagged. It tasted… well, she wasn't sure what it tasted like, only that it was revolting. Resisting the urge to lean over and spit out the bite she'd already taken, she forced herself to chew it.

_Gah. This is... it's…._ She frowned, and chewed some more. _It's chocolate. Plain, average, very yummy chocolate. It tastes fine._ Which was true, so far as it went, but at the same time, the very act of eating seemed… wrong.

Just as wearing her boots on the path had seemed wrong, and as jumping in that water had seemed right; as it still seemed right, actually-

_Screw that._ Deliberately, almost defiantly, she swallowed the chocolate she'd been chewing. It went down reluctantly, and she couldn't help feeling like she was doing something awful, like she was breaking some kind of rule. A little angry now, Faith took another bite off the candy bar, struggling through the resulting attack of queasiness. She managed to down that one as well, but when she prepared to take a third one, her stomach nearly rebelled.

"Fuck it; you win." Dropping the tin-foil wrapper to the ground in front of her, she scaled the rest of the bar off into the weeds. "There, you guys can have it. And I hope you choke." Angrily she jammed her hand into her other pocket, pulling out her cigarettes. Putting one to her lips, she paused to stare outwards. "You guys don't care if I smoke, do you? 'Cause if you don't like me eating chocolate then I'm sure you've got a problem with lung cancer too." Predictably there was no answer, and she went ahead and lit it. Nothing happened, no sudden urge to throw away the nasty-bad tobacco; which only proved that these entities had their priorities all wrong. Faith inhaled deeply; hoping the smoke would help to counteract the strange effects of all the fresh mountain air she'd been breathing.

_Lung cancer; yeah, right. Like I've got a chance of living that long_. Annabella had been more honest, less sensitive than Giles tried to be. Early on she'd told Faith the truth about her calling. _The average life expectancy of a Slayer is less than two years; closer to one and a half._ She gazed morosely at the dark water rippling quietly in front of her, then took another draw off the cigarette. She visualized the smoke traveling deep down into her lungs, then she held it there for a few seconds before breathing it out. That should give it plenty of time to do its damage, right? And why not let it do its worst? _Sorry, you evil tobacco executives; but you're not going to be the ones to take down this girl. A Slayer gets twenty months, give or take; only the real legends in the biz last much longer than that, and I really doubt that lil' Faith is one of those._ She traced her fingertips lightly along her thigh, feeling the myriad small snags and scuffs in the leather that told of patrols survived, of monsters that might have sent her tumbling, but that hadn't had time to enjoy the feeling before she'd gotten back up and sent them back to hell. She'd won a lot of fights, but how long before she found the one she _wouldn't_ win? _I'm over a quarter of the way through my 'life' now, and what am I getting done? How am I using what time I've got, now that I'm in Sunnydale? Backing up Buffy on her patrols, and even that's only when she or the English guy thinks things are seriously dire. The rest of the time I'm just hanging around by myself, watching the hours and days tick on by._

It wouldn't be so bad, or so lonely, if only Buffy…. Faith sighed.

_Back to her again; it always comes back to her. Maybe she's right, and the world really does revolve around her._

Faith had tried, over and over, to be the older girl's friend. She'd talked about her life in Boston (the parts she could bear to remember, and to share with someone who'd good opinion of her she valued), she'd offered advice on men, on fighting…. She'd tried her best to seem good enough, cool enough, for Buffy to spend time with, but it hadn't worked. Most of the time the blonde girl would end up with a blank stare, or worse yet a look of unease or disgust, as if she'd been soiled somehow by just listening. Not that she didn't encourage Faith to talk; it was just… Buffy made it seem like part of her job; mentoring the younger Slayer whether she wanted to or not.

Faith drew on her cigarette again, then looked around for somewhere to flick the ashes. It didn't seem right to mess up a place like this…. Finally, she used the silvery wrapper the candy bar had come wrapped in, which was still lying there beside her.

_If it's such a damned chore being around me, if she thinks I'm not worth the effort-_

Ms. Northam had stayed with her; she'd been ten times the Watcher Giles was. Of course, she hadn't had the honor, the privilege, of meeting Buffy. If she had, then maybe even she would have decided that Faith wasn't a good enough Slayer to bother with either.

That thought hit too close to some of the only good memories she had, and Faith shook her head jerkily from side to side in silent negation.

_No. No, she wouldn't have done that. She_ liked _me, at least a little._

Maybe she had liked Faith, but the Englishwoman's primary mission had been clear enough; the Slayer was a weapon, and Annabella Northam was to use that weapon as ruthlessly as was necessary in order to fulfill her duty as Watcher. She'd demanded a lot from the girl, and in return she gave the occasional word of praise, or a night where the two of them could talk about things other than training, or tactics, or what town they were headed for next. Looked at like that, from a distance, it could certainly be argued that Northam had used Faith's emotions against her.

_Did she--?_ The girl shifted where she sat, adjusting her feet so that the little pebbles beneath her weren't digging so painfully into her flesh. _I guess she might have, a little. She wanted something from me, needed me to stay with her and fight when she told me to, and in exchange for… for having a friend, I guess, I did whatever she asked._

That's kind of pathetic, isn't it? But what's worse is that I'd do it all over again; here, now. If only Buffy asked me, I'd do anything for her.

Nobody knew about the secret talk that Mrs. Summers had had with Faith, one day when she'd come looking for Buffy at her house; not Giles, and not the senior Slayer herself.

_She wanted to know if I was going to stay in Sunnydale; if I'd take over the Slaying so that Buffy could go to college. 'Course I already knew about that little plan of hers; that first night they had me over the two of them were talking, and I was only in the next room. They thought I couldn't hear 'em?_

Buffy's mother seemed not to understand the extent of a Slayer's abilities, but she did understand clearly enough the dangers of the job.

_She really wants her little girl out of here; she's grabbing at anything that might let B live a bit longer. Right now, that means me. She was practically beggin' me to do it, to jump ahead of Buffy in the line that leads to off to the dead Slayer's home. And I would, too…._

For Buffy, to let her do what she wanted and not what some Council of fossils wanted her to do, to let her live long enough to be one of those legendary Slayers, Faith would be willing to take on the hellmouth's minions all by herself… except that would mean that Buffy would be gone. Not just to college, but away to college, hundreds or thousands of miles away.

_And I can't let that happen. As much as she's screwing me up, I don't have any other reason to do anything at all. Without her, what is there for me?_

A last drag finished her cigarette, and she ground out the butt on the foil before folding it up. A moment's pressure from thumb and forefinger crushed the little silvery ball down to the size and shape of a dime, and she slipped it back into her pocket.

_Crap; I'm just running around in circles, thinking about this. There's no way forward, but there's no other way to go, either. Unless something changes, I'll still be here when it comes my time to kick it._

Kind of like me sitting here, stuck.

"Anybody feel like talking yet?" The watching entities (or whatever) were still out there, still invisible and still silent. "Haven't waited you out yet, huh?"

Nothing; just the quiet burble of the spring, and the darkness of the forest.

_Something, somehow, has to change, or I'll never be free._

Faith wasn't sure if she meant the thing with Buffy, or the thing with her sitting there with her ass slowly going numb; probably both. Either way, it really… really….

She stared at the pool. The dark, still water was the same as it had been ever since she'd sat down, but all of a sudden she found herself fascinated by it. There was something there that had not been there before, a depth that drew her eyes, and her mind along with them.

The dark, still water….

* * * * *

_The water was dark beneath the overhanging willow tree; darker than the mere shadow of the low-hanging branches should make it. There was a spirit there; it dwelt there in the river's bend, beneath the tree._

A dark spirit; a drowning spirit.

GrimWater, whose very name reflected his fascination with spirits such as this, finished his preparations. It would require powerful medicines (or magicks, as some would call them) to drive the creature out, but he was a Shaman, and considered to be among the mightiest of those who had ever lived. Two of his tribe's people had fallen to this entity before he had found its lair, and he vowed that they would be the last.

With a song of power already rising to his lips, he waded into the river. Casting a mixture of salt and enchanted sand before him, he called the spirit forth to do battle.

In a swell of dark and writhing water, it came.

Months later, as the end of Summer cloaked the lush plain in a garment of rich green and gold, the memory of that victory was small comfort. GrimWater knelt amid the ashes of his people's village, amid their charred and scattered bones.

The StarStone people, a tribe from the hills to the west, had come upon them by surprise, and in force. It was rare that so much death would come to those who were not warriors, but such things did happen. This time, it had happened while GrimWater was away on one of his many journeys. By the time he returned the signs were impossible to read, but his conjurings had shown him his enemy. With a fury beyond anything he had ever know, the Shaman vowed vengeance upon the men who had done this to his tribe. He then turned and walked, away from the village, and away from the remains of his wife and children.

Blood magic.

His face a rough and hard as flint, GrimWater watched as the stag bled its life into the broad stone bowl. This conjuring, and the others he had essayed over the last weeks, went against everything his medicine was based on, it went against the very natural order he had been sworn to uphold and defend, but he cared little for that now. Speaking words whose very sound withered the green grasses around his feet, he slipped inside the narrow cleft that split the cliff-face before him. Within this place lay one of the dark spirits he had driven from the land. Such things were often impossible to destroy, but by his workings he could imprison them where they could do no harm.

Such was not his intention any longer. Instead, he was revisiting each such place; first unbinding the restless and evil beings, and then using the living essences of the land's creatures to bind them together into a single force. One by one he gathered them, forging them into a single, horrifying thing.

Into a weapon.

Inside the cleft, confronting a roiling mass of shifting shadow that hissed its hatred of him, the Shaman allowed himself a moment of cold satisfaction. There would be vengeance for what had been done to his people, his family. And if the agonizing deaths of the StarStone people did not serve to ease his pain, why, there were other tribes as well who would serve to feed the thing he was creating.

For what right did any of the People have to life, if GrimWater's small daughter and infant son had been so cruelly murdered?

"Better that the earth be swept clean of Man, if Man is capable of such things." He whispered.

The darkness before him hissed again, but this time it was an eager sound.

"No!"

GrimWater's scream of denial was as useless as his struggles. The men holding him were strong, and his own body had grown wasted and feeble during the first days of Autumn, as he guided his creation across the land, destroying everything in his path. The spirit-beast he had created, a thing of poisoned shadow that took the shape of a great, black lizard, had reduced to desert everything within many days walk of his destroyed village. Now he sought to cross the mountains to the West, to obliterate the pestilence of Man that dwelled there, but in the pass that led through to the coastal lands he had been met by a group of foes.

Foes who seemed to know what they would be facing, and who had come well-armed to do battle with it.

"Away, unnatural thing!" The decrepit old man who stood before GrimWater's creation hardly looked strong enough to stand, but he bore the medicine pouch of a Shaman, and power shone from him. "By the turning seasons, by the medicine I wield; I banish you."

The black lizard, larger than the great bears who ruled the forest, seemed unimpressed. It bared teeth of obsidian, long as knives and far sharper.

From behind the old man, a woman stepped forth. Old, as he was, but where he was frail she was stout as a weathered stump. In one hand she bore a firedrill; a small, bow-like device that had long been used for the creation of fire in the villages. In her other hand she bore a sheaf of summer grain, fresh from the fall gathering.

"By the fires of our hearth, and the grain which sustains the People; I banish you."

In the normal course of things a skilled villager would need long minutes of work to bring forth a flame with such a tool, but this was a magical firebow. With a single touch, the stalks of grain caught fire; a blaze which somehow did not consume the sheaf she held, but nevertheless radiated a fierce heat.

The Spirit-Beast hissed, disliking the warmth as much as it disliked the old Shaman's medicine. It's tail lashed back and forth, but still it hesitated, awaiting GrimWater's command. Held by his foes as he was, he was unable to utilize his own powers, either to attack, or to unbind the Beast and bid it to strike. Frantically he fought to get free.

"Beast, you shall not pass while I live." Another man had come forward, a great Spear held forth in challenge. This was a young man, his body strong and hard with muscle, he moved with a hunter's grace. The weapon he held was carved with many symbols, the spearhead crafted from flint stratiated with wide veins of Copper. Sharp edges gleamed in the light of the woman's fire. "By my oath to protect my kin, by a Warrior's courage; I banish you."

The great Beast recoiled, its long claws tearing impotently at the stone beneath it, carving deep furrows in its fury. Likewise GrimWater struggled, but there was nothing he could do. So long as his medicine bound the Beast, it served him, but unless he was free he could not command it to kill those who stood now before it. If only there was a way to free it from the need to obey him, its unnatural need to rend and destroy would serve his purpose nearly as well as it did now.

Caught up in that thought, the Shaman sagged in his captor's hands.

To free the Beast completely…. But-No. It was his very life that bound it to him, via the bloody rituals he had performed in creating the monstrous distortion of an already dark nature. The only way to free it from his control would be with his.…

With his own death.

"Sound of life, sound of the People."

A maiden, young and beautiful, stood now beside the Warrior. At her side she held a small drum, its sides carved with crude images of men and women dancing. Her smooth, slender fingers tapped a rhythm upon it, a sound that quickened one's breath and stirred the blood. Within the drumming a listener seemed to hear the sound of a human heartbeat, separate from the rhythm she tapped and yet still an integral part of it.

"By the sound of my kin, of our hearts and our living; I banish you."

Born up by her drumming, the sound of the maiden's voice carried clear and strong.

The Spirit-Beast stumbled, its thick, gnarled legs shuddering as if it had been struck a mighty blow. Its very existence was based on negation, darkness, death. The life, and the celebration of that life implicit in the drumming only served to weaken it still farther. GrimWater knew that if his vengeance were to be complete, if every murderous human were to be wiped from the face of the world, he had to act now.

He could not escape; he was held too tightly for that. What he could do was duck his chin into his chest, bringing his teeth to the necklace he wore. Eleven dark beads hung there, tied with strands of his children's hair and each knot sealed with a drop of his own blood. Eleven beads, one for each of the dark spirits he had bound to his purpose in the form that now struggled and fought not ten strides from where he knelt. His teeth sank into the leather cord from which those beads hung, and with a wrench he tore the necklace asunder.

Beads spilled from the cord, falling to earth and striking with a sound like that of boulders crashing down a mountain. That necklace had been his protection; the barrier that had prevented the Beast from killing him while he slept, and his will did not hold it so tightly. Now, the shadowy creature's head whipped around, its ebon eyes finding him instantly.

GrimWater smiled. The SpiritBeast, confounded by the medicines wielded by the old man and his people, would take any opportunity to kill, even if it was the man who had created it. After all, he had made it to destroy all life, especially human life.

And GrimWater was merely another human. Moving swiftly, it came. If he had been free, a pair of simple gestures would have frozen it in place. As it was, the men holding him barely had time to scream before it was upon them, teeth slashing and talons tearing.

"B-By the light, the brightness of the dawn, and t-the glow of the moon, we s-stand…."

The last of the old Shaman's people was a child; a mere boy of perhaps ten summers. From a thong around his neck hung a smooth stone the size of his fist. As he stared in horror at the Beast that was killing GrimWater and his captors, as he struggled to speak the words, a brilliant light, clear and strong, began to shine forth from the stone. From where he had fallen, his body torn half-asunder, GrimWater also struggled. His trembling hands raised before him, he enacted a final bit of Blood magick.

"Darkness be free. Walk the earth, and let each step be poison, let your shadow be death, and your hunger not be sated until the last Man has passed beyond your fangs." Between hands that were covered in his life's blood, a rope of crimson light flared. With a grunt of effort, he wrenched his hands apart, and the glowing cord snapped and vanished. He sagged, even as the Beast left off savaging the bodies of the two men who had held the dark Shaman. With a savage, triumphant roar, it turned towards the five who opposed it. His last breath passed from him, but GrimWater's lips shaped it into a bitter whisper.

"Kill them; every one."

The SpiritBeast surged forward, and the Spear-bearer bounded forward to meet it. It was the child, though, whose voice rang out; shrilly, but clear and firm.

"-We stand against the Shadow! By the light of our souls against the dark, I banish you!"

The radiance of the stone had grown to eye-searing strength, and the Beast was forced to turn its head away. The warrior struck with his spear, the medicine bound with the weapon allowing it to draw dark ichor from the creature, but the wound was small. No mere weapon could kill GrimWater's creation, and even as his sight faded he held out hope that it would triumph now. Instead, the ancient Shaman raised his bony hands.

"By the medicine I wield, be now sealed away."

The old woman stepped forward, firebow and burning grain held forth.

"By the fire I hold, be now sealed away."

The Warrior leapt away from the savage claws of the SpiritBeast, and the spear he held spun in his hands as he readied himself to strike once more.

"By the strength within my heart, be now sealed away."

The maiden spoke, her fingers never ceasing in their tapping upon her drum.

"By the lives we lead, in celebration of birth and rebirth, be now sealed away."

And finally, the child.

"By the light within, the truth of what we are, and will ever be, be now sealed away."

The creature writhed in agony, unable to approach the five who stood against it. GrimWater felt faint despair as even his hearing begin to dim. The last words he heard were the old man's.

"By medicine and fire, strength and song, we banish you. With all these things, gathered into one by the light within us all, let this darkness be now bound; bound up and cast beyond the rim of the world, where it will stay so long as stars and stone and sea endure."

"It is done!"

The very air shook as the SpiritBeast was banished; the oppressive weight of its presence vanished.

GrimWater's death took him just moments later, but even then he knew that the instrument of his vengeance lived still. Bound for now, yes, but under the proper conditions it might yet return. That thought was his only comfort as his soul fled the mortal world.

__

* * * * *


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

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See Chapter One for Disclaimer

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Faith's eyes snapped open.

She was still sitting by the pool, her feet tucked under her thighs, cold against the rough stone.

_What--?_ She pressed a hand to her eyes, and the movement was clumsy. She felt drunk, or drugged.

_And not in a good way, either._ She took her hand away and blinked slowly, still dazed by whatever that had been. _Was it a Slayer dream? I've only had a couple, and yeah, they were kinda twisted too, but this seemed diff-_

"Here now; get outta here, all of you! Hey!"

The strange, _loud_ voice came from a man just a few feet off to the side of where Faith sat. He wasn't looking at her; instead he was capering around, waving his hands and motioning like he was fighting with a bee or something. Even though he didn't have any weapons out yet, the Slayer acted on instinct, trying to lunge to her feet and take a defensive stance. She tried, but her body still wasn't working right. All she managed was to kick herself backwards a bit, and end up sprawled on her butt with her legs splayed out towards the pool. Bracing herself on her palms, she gritted her teeth and struggled to make her legs obey her.

"You heard me, leave the kid alone! Don't make me do something harsh; you wouldn't like that one bit!"

Since she couldn't get her feet under her, Faith settled for staring in disbelief. It was a man; a little while ago she would have said he was an old man, but being fresh from seeing the withered old Shaman in her dream, she now had a better idea of what someone truly old looked like. This one wasn't that old looking; fifty, maybe a little older, though he looked fit enough. His face was deeply lined, but somehow it just made him look tougher, or harder, instead of old and weak. Like everyone she'd seen in the dream, he was an Indian (or Native American, if you wanted to be Politically-Correct about it), with dark eyes and long, black, hair tied back in an intricate braid.

Faith's nightvision showed him clearly enough for her to see that he was wearing ragged blue jeans, so worn that both knees were torn out. He had on a pair of ancient Converse sneakers, the kind that had gone out of style a decade before she'd been born. A dark leather vest was all that covered the rest of him, and it showed arms and a torso that were lean and ropy with muscle.

"There, there! Off you go, Hyah!"

He gave a last wave of his hands, and now that she was paying attention, she saw several… somethings; balls of agitated air, or masses of unsettled moonlight, drifting away reluctantly. The sense she got from them was identical to the presences she'd felt watching her earlier; these, then, were her tormenters? They didn't look so scary now. Actually, they seemed kind of sad; almost like neglected children who'd realized that daddy was too busy to be bothered, and they were being sent off outside to play yet again. As they disappeared into the night, the man dusted off his hands and turned to look down at her.

"All right…." He took in her awkward position on the ground and his face creased a bit more as he frowned. "You okay there, girl?"

Faith's head was clearing now, and her body seemed to be recovering along with it. She managed to get to her feet, though she swayed unsteadily on the way up. When the Indian reached out a hand to steady her, she recoiled so violently that she almost stumbled backwards into the tall grass that surrounded the little clearing.

"Fine! I'm-" She caught her balance, then slid into a fairly inconspicuous ready stance; feet set but arms loose at her sides. The last remains of the buzzed state she'd woke with were fading, and she took a deep breath. "I'm fine."

He nodded, a small, tight smile on his lips matching the gleam in his dark eyes. He seemed mightily pleased about something, and she felt her own wariness click a notch higher.

"Well then; I figured you'd be all right, at least once I ran off those meddlesome little critters." His casual wave took in the surrounding forest, where the faintly glowing entities had vanished. "They weren't trying to hurt you, understand, but the only way they could get inside the head of someone as powerful as you is to gang up on you in a big way." Bony fingers rubbed at his jaw, and he shrugged. "'Course even then they had to trance you to get through… though maybe them dreams your kind is prone to have sort of gave 'em a channel inside-"

Faith couldn't hold it in any longer.

"Who the fuck _are_ you?" Now that the disorientation was fading, she was getting mightily pissed. "What kind of game are you people playing with me, huh?!"

The man's face transformed in an instant, going from amused to solemn, though his dark eyes still glittered in the dimness with a peculiar intensity.

"It's not a game; none of this here, tonight, is a game." His voice was almost spooky for a second there, but before Faith could decide how she wanted to respond, he shrugged and smiled again. "And if it were, I wouldn't be one of the players. At best, I'm someone who's watching from the sidelines, and from time to time I might yell insults at one of the teams -or both of 'em-- and there's some who would say that I'm not even that; that what I actually am is a part of the field where things are being played out." His smile became a mischievous grin. "One thing's for damned sure; I'm not a referee. I don't believe in following the rulebook; leastways not when there's a choice in the matter."

Faith wasn't sure how to answer that little speech, so she concentrated on determining what he was, instead of what he was saying. Studying him, she tried her best to reach out with more than physical senses. A Slayer was supposed to be able to pick up a demon quite a ways off, and identify most other supernatural beings at least upon seeing them… but no joy here. She'd always sucked at that stuff, even more so that Buffy did. It was a mark of how weird those watching entities had been that she'd been able to sense them stalking her; it wasn't often that she could do something like that. Now, looking at this guy, all she knew was that he seemed a little cracked. There didn't seem to be any vamp-vibes coming off of him, but then, some of them could hide it pretty well.

"What are you?" She asked, all the while wishing that she had more in the way of weapons than just the one stake in her belt. He looked back at her, then took a step closer. She tensed, ready to lunge forward and meet him head-on if that was what he wanted… but he just folded himself down until he was sitting cross-legged on the stone. Looking up at her, he shrugged.

"Me? I'm just an old man, sitting here in the woods and talking to a pretty girl."

He gestured at her to take a seat there in front of him, basically in the same spot where she'd been before, when she'd had that dream… or whatever.

She tilted her head a fraction to the side, still trying to detect anything 'off' about him. He still didn't feel like a vampire, but there might just be something there. Something deep, and powerful, and more than a little disturbing, but in an odd way….

Or maybe that was just her (theoretically nonexistent) imagination again.

"Uh huh." She let her skepticism color her voice, but he seemed not to notice; or to care. He just looked at her, waiting, and so she moved just far enough towards him so that she wouldn't be sitting in the dirt and grass that ringed the bare stone, and then she sat. Sitting down and having her legs under her like that would slow her fractionally if she had to make a quick move, but her eyes and ears told her that there were no other physical beings within a hundred yards. The less-than-physical critters might be able to sneak up on her, though she'd been able to feel them before. Which brought up another question.

"Okay then, 'old man'; what were those things you ran off?" She jerked her thumb back over her shoulder, indicating the now-vanished watchers.

He didn't follow her gesture. Instead, those glittering eyes stayed focused on her own.

"Those are Manitou; the little people of the forest."

Faith's fingers were digging nervously at the scuffs in her pants, and she found herself wanting to look away from his eyes; if Giles had an imposing weight of knowledge and intelligence inside his head, this guy's gaze had the zillion-pound mass of a skyscraper behind it. Hating the way he was putting her on the defensive with just a look, she dug out her cigarettes.

_Yep, there's nothing that makes you look all tough and unconcerned like taking the time to light up, and making the other person wait while you do._

She lit it, then took a draw.

_Gee, my first day back smoking and I'm going through 'em pretty fast; I'd better watch it._ It was an odd thought to occur to her while facing someone who might just be another crazed Indian sorcerer or whatever, bent on destroying the world, and it was followed by yet another. _Yeah, I'd better watch how many of these I smoke… or else I might have a rough and raspy voice when I grow up._

Faith laughed out loud. She couldn't help it; here she was, sitting across from who knows what, fresh from having some spooky spirit-things screw around with her mind, and still she managed to crack herself up. She managed to stifle it after just a couple of seconds, worried that the old man might think she was laughing at him and get all upset, but she needn't have worried. He grinned at her, as if sharing the joke, and the lines of his face didn't fight that grin at all; it looked natural on him. After a moment, she got her expression under control; this wasn't the time to be screwing around with someone she knew nothing at all about.

"Sorry. Ah, okay; Manitou." She suddenly didn't feel the least bit like laughing; this was her life, her ever-so-short life they were discussing here. "What are they, and what do they want with me?"

Looking at her, his smile went away, leaving his face looking like a mask, with only those eyes showing any sign of life.

"It's not a simple question of what they want; with someone like you it _can't_ be that simple." Faith just looked at him, waiting for him to get done with the bullshit and tell her something that made sense. He waited too, looking content to spend a few hours sitting there with her without getting much of anything done.

_Shit. Did I piss him off, somehow? What's he waiting for?_

A full minute crawled by.

_This guy's a sorcerer, right? Or whatever an Indian would call it-a Shaman._ Even Faith knew that the two terms didn't mean anything like the same thing, but that wasn't important at the moment. _Maybe there's something I should do, now? This is some kind of sacred place, right?_ He waited, his posture mirroring hers, his eyes…. As she sat thinking, she saw his eyes flick briefly downwards, towards something on the ground beside her. _Maybe it's a ritual, something… wait a second._

He glanced downwards again, just for an instant before he went back to meeting her eyes patiently. Faith leaned back just a fraction, and looked over to see what it was.

Her cigarettes. She'd set them on the ground beside her instead of putting them back in her jacket pocket. Other than that, she couldn't see anything at all of interest there.

_Um. Well, okay then._

Silently, she picked up the pack and held it out to him; using her left hand in case he suddenly morphed into something toothy and bit it off at the wrist or something. Her right hand just happened to be resting a few inches away from where her stake was tucked through her belt. As a weapon it seemed pathetically inadequate, but it was all she had.

Fortunately, things went better than she expected. He reached out, slowly, and took them from her.

"Thank you." He said, withdrawing one from the package before handing them back from her. She took it back, again with her left hand. She was about to start looking for her lighter when he nodded towards her hand. "I like your rings." Automatically she glanced at the two coppery circles on her fingers, only for an instant, and when she looked up again he had somehow lit the cigarette and was inhaling smoke.

Faith frowned, irritated at the parlor trick, but he didn't react; instead he shifted his position fractionally, resting his arms on his legs as he looked at her.

"You want to know what's going on here? All right, I'll explain it as clearly as I can." That grin flickered across his face for a moment, gone almost before it was seen. "Though folks like myself aren't supposed to just lay it all out for you, you know. We're supposed to be all enigmatic and mysterious, with nothing we say making sense until after all the thunder and lightning are over with."

Faith blinked, a little surprised by how little pretension the old guy was showing. But the part about-

"Thunder and lighting?" She didn't like the hint of tension that crept into her voice there, so she took a drag from her cigarette to try and cover it. "So, there's going to be some kind of rumble before this is through?"

He nodded, those glittering eyes never leaving her.

"Yes, probably… though that's not really the point of any of this."

Faith found herself looking closer at his eyes. The irises were so dark, more black than dark brown, that his pupils were lost in them. It was kind of creepy, especially the weird way they gleamed even in the near-total darkness where they sat.

"What is the point?"

He seemed to focus on her even more intently, though he didn't move or do anything else she could see.

"Change, Faith. Change is the point."

He sat back a bit, evidently waiting for her to digest that. So she tried, she really tried to come up with something deep and insightful and smart-sounding. Unfortunately, in the end all she could say was,

"Huh?"

He didn't grin this time; he seemed to think this stuff was important.

"Take these, for example." He raised his hand, displaying the cigarette he held between his fingers. "For millennia among the People, tobacco was held in special regard. It had a place in many ceremonies; to share smoke with someone, as we are doing here, was to make a bond between them. Smoke was part of something spiritual, something sacred." He regarded the cigarette, then shrugged and took a draw. Blowing the smoke out through his nostrils, he shook his head sadly. "But when the Europeans came, they took tobacco and made it something casual, something to be done for no reason other than that it was, in some odd way, pleasurable." He looked sidelong at Faith and lowered his voice for a moment. "And also; some thought it made them look wicked cool." The Slayer, who'd been taking a drag of her own at that particular moment, erupted in a fit of coughing that had nothing to do with the faint, familiar tickle-tingle in her throat and lungs. She glared at the old man, but he was already continuing. "That was change; a fundamental shift in something, albeit a minor thing. And today it's changed again, and now if you see someone smoking all it means is that they're too stupid to read a warning label… or at least to understand one."

"Hey!"

Faith sat up straight, angry indignation welling up strong and fast, but he waved her back.

"Forgive me; I meant no insult. And you are, as you well know, a special case."

She searched his face and his words for any sign of sarcasm, but either he was an awesome liar or he was telling the truth.

"Yeah, well…." Faith was unaccustomed to feeling modest and shy, but this was a strange night. And now she felt very uncomfortable sitting there and holding a cigarette. She leaned over and started to snub it out against the ground, but then that old, old commercial flashed through her head; the one with the Indian guy silently weeping as people threw garbage out of their cars as they drove past on the highway. Hesitating, she wondered what she could do with it that wouldn't piss him off, but he rescued her. Reaching over, he took the cigarette from her. Putting it in the same hand as the one he'd been smoking, he passed his free hand across them, momentarily obscuring them from her sight for a moment. After his palm had passed, the cigarettes were gone; their dimly glowing coals replaced by the soft, blinking light of a pair of fireflies. Faith was sure that it was some kind of gag, absolutely sure that he couldn't have actually done what it looked like he'd done… and then the two insects took flight, winging their way slowly off across the pool.

Faith looked at him, and he looked back.

"Magic; so what?" She was working hard to keep from being impressed. She knew spells and stuff like that was real, but she'd never been around any of it. Of course Willow was supposed to be able to do stuff like that, though she'd never seen the self-proclaimed Wicca ever actually do anything more than float small objects in the air.

The man's eyebrow quirked slightly when he answered.

"Not magick; transformation." She couldn't see what the difference was, but he seemed to think it was important. "I'm a big, big fan of transformation. You might even say it's my theme."

Now that she didn't have a cigarette, Faith was having trouble deciding what to do with her hands. For lack of anything else to do, she started tugging at the hair that spilled forward over one shoulder.

"Don't get me wrong, all of that --and the tricks too-- was great. But weren't you saying you were going to go easy on the 'mysterious bullshit' stuff here?"

He nodded, the glitter of his eyes softening a bit.

"Very true, I did say that. It's just a bit difficult to explain without giving you the proper context." He scratched at his chin again, looking thoughtful. "There are three purposes intersecting here; three reasons why what will happen tonight must happen." He paused, and Faith nodded to let him know that so far she was following. "The simplest aspect of this, the most basic level of the whole thing, is you; your need to discover something about yourself. Your quest to find a place in the greater scheme of things."

She looked at him like he'd just grown a set of antenna out of his forehead.

"Uh, I hate to bust your bubble there, Tonto, but I'm just passing through." She pointed downslope, vaguely in the direction of the highway. "I'm on my way somewhere for a little vacation, and I had to make a minor detour up here." Raising her chin slightly, Faith gave him her best challenging stare. "I'm not questing for much of anything, right now. In fact, if you'll show me the path back down to the highway, I'll get outta your face."

He ignored the prompting and just shook his head.

"Whether or not you consciously knew, you did come here for a reason. For countless generations, young Warriors would journey into the wilderness, seeking guidance from the spirits. If their purpose was pure, and their need great, they would be granted a vision; a glimpse of their future, communication from an ancestor… or a totem, an animal or symbol which would help them to understand their true nature." He gave her an appraising look, one that made goosebumps rise all along her arms. "Your blood is a mix of so many lines that I honestly can't tell if there is anything of the People there, but the power within you is another route to things both old and deep. Your need brought you here, to this place, and even if you did not know what to do once you arrived, the spirits recognized your purpose."

"I told you; I don't have a fucking purpose." Faith ground out through gritted teeth. "I'm on my way to Monterey. Some cops showed up, and I just happened to find this path that led up-"

"Coincidence; of course." He sounded so amiable that she looked at him in surprise. "The same sort of coincidence, one supposes, that led to you being chosen as a Slayer."

It didn't even startle her that he knew about that stuff; it fit perfectly with the rest of his 'smart-ass holy man' groove that she let it pass, concentrating instead on her argument.

"That's a completely different thing! I was, y'know, destined to be-"

_To be called, and then to totally fuck things up. Ms. Northam dead, me stuck here with no real Watcher, just a guy who already has a Slayer, keeping an eye on me to make sure I don't somehow manage to screw up even worse before some vamp wastes me and they get a shiny new girl that everyone will like a whole lot more--_

"-To be what I am." Faith finished, somewhat lamely. The sad truth of it was that she really didn't believe in anything at all; not fate, not destiny, not anything. But, at the same time, she wanted so badly to believe in whatever had led her to be Called, to become a Slayer. It was the only thing she had that was worth anything at all, the only value she'd ever been able to claim for herself. If it wasn't all part of some cosmic plan, if she'd just lucked out in some random super-power lottery, then….

Then nothing had really changed at all, had it? She was still the same Faith who'd been on the fast track to dying in some stinking alley in greater Boston, only now she'd been given the opportunity to fail not just herself, but a whole world of people. When she finally went down, it wouldn't even be with the comfort of anonymity; some Watcher geek in England would record the grisly, wretched details of her death for future generations.

The old man was sitting patiently, watching her with eyes that held something suspiciously like pity. She tried to gather her anger to her, to wrap it around her like armor before he struck at the vulnerability she'd accidentally shown him, but when he spoke again it wasn't to attack her.

"Faith… in a way you're more right than you could possibly know; and at the same time you are so profoundly wrong that I'm staggered by the weight of it." That took her aback, and she repeated his words in her head a couple of times, trying to decide if he'd just insulted her. The Indian leaned forward, reaching out to tap her on one leather-clad knee. "This, this body and the soul within it, this is what you are. Not what happens around you, or even what happens to you." He leaned back, as if he could sense her unease at having someone that close to her at that moment. She wanted so badly to have a weapon of some kind, something, anything that would make her feel less vulnerable… and a stake just didn't do it. He dipped his head slightly, catching her gaze. "You came here because you needed to, not because some fortune teller prophesied it. You're upset, right? You feel like something needs to change, for better or worse, because anything is better than the way things are now. Am I right?"

She stared at him in amazement.

"I guess… sort of."

_Sort of exactly, actually._ She thought. _This thing with Buffy, with me feeling like I do and she either not knowing or not caring. Being forced to play second Slayer to her, instead of sharing the job like we should be doing. It's not even that I have a problem with her being the one deciding what we do and how we do it; she's older, she's probably smarter, too. It's just…._

I just want to be treated like I matter, like I deserve to be there. The way she acts, and Giles, and Willow and all of them… They treat me like a mistake. Whenever they do bring me in for something, it's almost as an afterthought. They've already figured out what's happening and what they're going to do about it, so they just swing by and pick me up, just like they stop to get weapons, or magic supplies, or some fucking cokes at the drive-thru. And I'm supposed to be there, waiting for them, no matter what else I might want to be doing, even if they never bothered to tell me that anything weird was even going on.

Buffy whines so much about not having a normal life, but she never bothers to wonder what I think about mine. I can't keep living that way, not forever, but at the same time, I can't do anything else, either. Right now she doesn't think much of me, she's even a little disgusted by what she knows about my past. But that's still better than what she'd think if I lost it and bitch-slapped Willow through a wall like she deserves, or told Giles to go fuck himself, and the whole dammed Council while he was at it.

But I can't do that; I can't do anything at all or it might make things worse. So….

"So now what?"

It came out sounding sullen, but if he was expecting something more from her right now he was just going to have to live with disappointment. Predictably, he didn't take offense at her tone.

"Well, normally the spirits would guide you to some manner of realization or insight. In most cases the person undertaking the quest would have fasted, or taken a hallucinogenic of some kind to help achieve the proper mental state." Faith wasn't a fan of fasting, but if some chemical adjustment was all it took, then she was perfectly-- "But this isn't going to be like that." He said firmly, cutting her off in mid-thought. "Remember when I said that your purpose here was only one of three?" She nodded that yes, she did recall that. "Well, the second need driving these events is that of the spirits themselves."

Faith shifted uneasily. She lived her life rooted firmly in the here and now; the physical world. Talking about what a spirit did or did not want made her feel a little hokey, and more than a little stupid; it was like listening to people who took phone psychics seriously, or who thought that pro wrestling was real.

"Okay; what's their problem, and why should I care?"

The bitterness and sarcasm in her voice were obvious even to her, and his lips twisted as if he'd tasted something sour.

"You've had more than your fair share of people demanding something from you in exchange for a show of kindness, haven't you?" The gentleness with which he said the words was worse than an accusation, and she couldn't help looking away. "I'm sorry, but that is very much what they have in mind for you. The spirits will guide you, but it will be a trial by combat. Your passage into adulthood will either be successful… or fatal." His already dark eyes seemed to go completely black; turning him into an eerie-looking figure indeed. "The vision they showed you, the spirit-beast that was banished long ago, once again threatens the land." His voice grew quieter, and when Faith looked back at him, he seemed troubled. "It should not be your task, this foe is very likely too mighty to be defeated, even by the power which you wield, but…." He spread his hands, indicating his helplessness. "The great Shamans of the past are no more. A Slayer may not be enough… but you are all they have."

Faith didn't much care for the sound of that.

"This sounds like a raw deal I'm bein' handed, here. They'll help me do this 'VisionQuest' thing --this thing you say I came here for, without even knowin' why-- but in trade for 'helping' me, they're going to get me killed fighting this thing from my dream."

He met her glare evenly.

"Yes."

She bared her teeth in a snarl.

"Well, screw that!" She lunged to her feet, stalking along the edge of the little clearing, searching for a way through the brush and into the forest. "C'mon, show me that damn path! We can be back at the road by dawn, and if you still wanna do your 'wise old injun' act, we can do it for the tourists and make a bundle." He made no move to get up, and she folded her arms under her breasts. "What?"

He looked up at her, and that glint of pity was still there in his eyes.

"I told you; you are all the spirits have, you are their lone, slender hope of survival." He turned his head and regarded the wall of green that encircled the clearing. "That being so, they will not allow you to leave here, except in the direction they choose." He pointed, and she was startled to see an opening; a gap that revealed a trail that led off towards where the road had to be. "That path, or any other, will lead you where they wish, and not back to civilization."

Faith considered that.

"Then I won't use a path. I'll just pick a direction and go; keep walking until I get somewhere."

He was shaking his head.

"That will not work; not here, not where so many of the old powers still walk. No matter which way you turn, your journey will end where they will it."

She stared at him, trying to see if he was shitting her, but everything in her gut told her that he was telling it straight. She turned away, staring into the pool's dark depths without really seeing anything at all.

"Oh."

_Gee. I told Giles that some funny business might be going on out here, and it turns out I was right, huh? 'Cept it's not so funny now that I'm here, and neck-deep in it. _She wished she could smoke another cigarette without remembering the old man's line about warning labels and stupidity, she wished she had a beer or three handy, and to hell with whatever he would say about her being underage.

_Fuck it; what I really wish is that Buffy were here with me, that we were taking this stuff on together, as the Chosen Two, instead of me being here all alone, and on my way back to that place where I'm so scared that I'm all set to piss myself again._

"Faith." His voice floated out of the darkness behind her, sounding all warm and reassuring. "Don't forget what I said, about the events around you not being who you are." There came the sound of a stirring, and a moment later a gentle hand on her shoulder. "There are white men, philosophers, who say that events shape us, make us stronger if only we survive them." The hand pulled at her, and with surprising strength, and she was turned until she faced him in the darkness. He looked down at her, meeting her brown eyes with his black ones. "Those men are wrong. Events do not shape us, we shape ourselves. We transform ourselves every day, find new strengths, forge new parts of ourselves in order to carry through what life brings us. Inside each person, there is a power which transcends the physical, a well of determination and resolve which allows us to overcome our fear, and grief, and pain and endure; even triumph."

Faith hugged herself, trying to keep from shivering.

"We're-" She glanced away by habit, then forced herself to look back at him. "We're not stronger because of what we survive?" That saying, the one that went 'That which does not kill me, makes me stronger', that had always been one of her favorites, a way to look at all the shit she'd gone through as something at least slightly positive. The old man, though, didn't agree, and he shook his head now.

"No. We survive, because if we are not strong enough in the beginning, we need only wish to be stronger, strive to adapt and grow, and it becomes so. Events may be the catalyst for such change, but it is only the individual who can make it come to pass. Stolidly butting one's head against a boulder will seldom gain a passage to the other side, but those who look, and strive, can move outside the lines drawn for them, and travel anywhere. Some, sadly, lack the ability, and nearly all will ultimately reach their limit, but within those bounds, mankind is capable of wonders indeed."

That had gotten a little too deep for her, but she was fairly sure she had the gist of it.

"So, you think I should go ahead and play their game? Trust in myself, hope I've got what it takes to make it through?"

He sighed, and for the first time it was he who looked away.

"I can't say; it is not my place to make your decisions for you." He thought for a moment, then shrugged. "All I can say is that I believe you have a greater chance of surviving this than any other who now lives." Not real comforting, and the slightly embarrassed look on his face showed that he knew it. "And, well, if you do triumph over the SpiritBeast, you will most certainly have earned your feather."

The way he kept jumping around, to seemingly unconnected subjects, had her feeling a little dizzy all over again.

"Feather?"

"Yes. Some tribes would recognize a person's successful growth or transition; their transformation, if you prefer, by giving them a black feather, usually from a Raven." His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "The Raven was a symbol of changes and transformations, you see, and held in very high regard." He paused, seeming to recall something rather embarassing. "Well, held in high regard by some," He finally added. "Some folks thought Raven was a right bastard, but we won't talk about them."

Faith shook her head in irritation. It was bad enough that she was going to have to do some kind of suicidal combat with a demon from Indian hell, but now she had to stand here and listen to this old guy butcher the truth regarding native rituals.

"You've got that feather thing all wrong, Injun Joe." He blinked, looking surprised that she'd called him on it, which at least gave her a little satisfaction in what had been an otherwise unpleasant few hours. "They gave feathers for acts of bravery; Eagle feathers, not Raven."

He squinted at her, cocking his head slightly, as if he were looking at something nearly as interesting as it was annoying.

"No, you're wrong. _Some_ tribes gave feathers for bravery, but there were others who gave them to mark a passage, a change from one state of being to another." Her disbelief must have been obvious, because he made a tsking sound. "Try and remember who's the Indian here, and who's the paleface who got lost in the woods, okay?" There wasn't much to say about _that_, but before she could even try and come up with a comeback, he did something else. "Look, if you don't believe me, then how do you explain _these?_"

And with that he reached out, and pulled another lock of her hair forward over her shoulder. Faith started to lift her arm, to thrust his hand away from her, but her eyes dropped to look at what he was holding and the move stopped before it was completed.

There, tied into her hair, were two glossy black feathers.

She took a step back, putting herself out of his reach as she ran her fingers over them. They were real; about as long as her hand, silky-soft and yet not seeming in the least bit fragile. For a moment she thought he must have had them hidden somehow, that maybe he'd hung them on her even as he had pulled them into view, but when she took a closer look…. They were tied into place; knotted securely, and in such a way that it would have been impossible to have done it quickly. She tugged at them, raising her head to look at the old man.

"Where did these come from?"

He was looking serious again, his mobile face set in firm lines.

"They're a part of you; they have been every since you earned them." Noting her increasingly urgent attempts to pull them free, he raised one hand slightly. "Relax, they can't hurt you, but they can't be removed, either. They_ are_ you, or at least a part of you; of what has made you the person you are."

She looked down at them. No matter how hard she pulled, the weren't budging. Maybe if she just cut those particular strands of hair… but she didn't have anything to cut them with out here.

"What are they?"

He smiled a little.

"Feathers?" She glared, balling one hand into a fist, and he raised his hands as if to ward off a blow. "All right, more than that. Do you want to know details?" He took a step closer, and reached out again. His finger lightly brushed against one of the mysterious dark objects, the one which was tied into her hair slightly higher than the other. "This one… is your escape."

A vision exploded behind Faith's eyes.

_--Free, and this time she was going to stay that way. No more running away to her aunt's house, or hiding in the backyard of the kid she knew down the street. This time she was getting away. Away from her mother's neglect and drug-hazed abuse, away from the bastards mom let shack up with her, and let molest her barely-teenaged daughter; that was over. This time she would run, and keep running until the whole city was between her and her so-called home. She wouldn't leave Boston; she didn't even know where else she would go if she did. No, she would find someplace, some out of the way neighborhood, and she'd find some way to make it on her own. She'd find some friends, maybe even a boyfriend, who would help her. She outta be able to grab and hold some guy's attention; she'd sure had enough experience with what they wanted from a girl, despite her lack of years._

"After what I've had to live through so far, anything'll be a change for the better. Anything at all…."-

Faith's eyes cleared; she was still where she'd been standing, still there beside the pool, looking up at the old man with the black eyes. She took a slow, shuddering breath, trying to get a hold of herself before she broke down and cried.

_God! That was more than just a vision, that was… it was…. It was everything I felt at that moment. It was like I was back there, reliving it; how it felt, what I was thinking… christ, I could even feel the bruises I'd gotten the night before, when Neal got so drunk that he couldn't tell me and mom apart. Or maybe he just got so drunk that he didn't care; he was that kind of shit, ol' Neal._

"Forgive me, I know it's painful to feel such things." He sounded like he really did know, and the blistering words forming in her throat died unspoken. "It was brave, incredibly brave, for a child to take that leap into the unknown."

Faith shrugged, looking down at the dark ground between them.

"It didn't feel brave. It felt a lot like running away."

He knelt; there, on the ground in front of her he knelt, putting himself back in her line of sight.

"It was more than that. If you had stayed, your spirit would have been extinguished; you would have become a shadow reflection of your mother, or perhaps you would have died. There was no way to fight what was happening to you, no way to save your mother, for she did not wish to be saved. You did what you could do; you set out on your own, with no idea of what was to come. You dared everything; you transformed yourself."

Faith's mouth twisted, fidgeting and rubbing her hands against each other.

"I transformed myself, all right. Into a part-time hooker, part-time drug addict, full-time loser."

"No, you didn't. You suffered, yes, and part of you succumbed to the perils of your surroundings, but the core of you, that which is the essential you, that survived, waiting, until…."

She refolded her arms across her middle, not sure she wanted to hear any more but unable to keep from asking.

"Until what?"

He reached out again, and she braced herself as he touched the second feather.

"This."

_--She was dying; it was that simple. That smack that Jimmy 'the stick' had given her such a sweet deal on must have been made of pure drain-cleaner. Sure, the weirdo-lady with the funny accent wanted Faith to get clean, but it was easy to sneak out and meet up with her connection. Ms. 'I've got a grammar-book shoved up my ass sideways' Northam probably wouldn't even notice her missing bracelet, either, the one that had gone to pay for the heroin that was even now clawing its way through Faith's veins. She lay curled up on the couch, the nice, clean one in the fancy hotel where the woman lived._

Which was where Faith now spent most of her time. Better, she figured, to sit and listen to stories about vampires and demons than to be out scrounging in dumpsters for something to eat. If this English chick thought that Faith was some magical champion just waiting to be called into the fight by the powers above, who was she to argue?

Of course, none of that would matter much, now. When Ms. Northam got back, she would find a dead girl. One more tragic example of a young, impoverished American to tell the folks back in the UK. Another spasm wracked her body, and she tried to scream; tried, but her chest was locked in place, every muscle tightening, choking off her screams, her whimpers, her very breath. Agony like she'd never known rolled upwards, from her toes, her fingertips, along every nerve in between. It gathered force and momentum like a wave, joining to surge up through her spine, through her heart, to finally crash into her brain with a flare of white and gold light. She did manage to scream then, faintly, as drool spilled from her mouth to stain the fabric beneath her cheek.

The door to the room opened, and a woman stepped inside. Faith's eyes weren't working very well, but she could still recognize who it was. Annabella Northam, ("You will call me Ms. Northam, Faith"), self-proclaimed Watcher and obvious looney… and the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. The Englishwoman stopped short as she saw Faith lying there, then hurried over. The girl knew a moment of profound relief; she was sick, but as long as she got to the hospital, then everything would be okay, right? The docs, they could keep her alive until the shit she'd injected wore off, and then she'd be fine.

Right?

Except… except Ms. Northam wasn't calling 911, she wasn't moving with frantic urgency to help Faith to her feet and bustle her off to the hospital. All she seemed to be doing was feeling along Faith's throat, prying open first one eye, and then the other, and finally seating herself on the couch and lightly clasping one of Faith's hands in her own. The girl struggled to speak, to beg her to do something to help her, but the rictus still gripped every muscle in her body. She couldn't speak, and every attempt to draw breath sent lancing pains through her chest. The pain began to rise again, and she managed to whimper.

"Shh. Relax, Faith." Annabella said, squeezing Faith's hand. "Let it happen. This was your destiny from the day of your birth."

'What', Faith wondered, 'to die'? It didn't feel much like destiny. What it felt like was a million white-hot wires running through her flesh, slowly cooking her alive. She couldn't imagine what had been in that junk she'd taken. It had passed the rudimentary tests an addict could do, to see if what they'd bought was legit. It had looked like Heroin; tasted like it, even felt like it, once it was in. Only now….

Now it stretched her out on the couch, straining so hard that every tendon stood out like a cable, and she felt her bones creaking. Joints popped, and fresh agony crackled through her, feeling like her dammed cells were self-destructing a series mass-suicides. Her gut was burning, the sensation spreading in waves. Liquid iron was being poured into her belly, more and more until she couldn't hold any more… except more came. Light, heat, that white-gold light again, except this time it wasn't an explosion in her brain, it was an ocean of power that she was suspended in, infinite, terrible… and strangely familiar.

Suddenly, almost as suddenly as it had come upon her, the pain began to recede. First she managed to take a half-breath to let out a cry, then a full breath to use for a scream, and then-

--Then--

--And then there was no need to scream, because there was no pain. She blinked, fighting to get her eyes to focus properly. When they did, she found Ms. Northam still sitting there on the couch beside her. She was gingerly cradling her hand, the one Faith had been holding while she was hurting so much. Now it was the Englishwoman who looked to be in pain, with her face all pale and every one of her fingers on that hand all twisted and quickly swelling. Despite that, Annabella managed a smile, and dipped her head in a faint, solemn bow.

"Congratulations, Faith." Her smile faded a bit, sadness stealing it away. "The Slayer is dead; long live the Slayer."

She sat up, marveling at how easily she moved. She felt wonderful, fantastic even.

And her world was never the same again.-

Her vision cleared again; dark forest, dark pool, the Indian kneeling there and looking into her eyes. She pulled back, her feet right next to the water now.

"That wasn't me." She said, her voice low and even rougher than usual. "That was nothing I did; it just got gave to me."

_Fuck, am I battering my grammar enough, there? Ms. Northam would be staring a hole through me for talking like that._

The old man stood, in a movement much smoother than she would have expected from someone his apparent age.

"You think you didn't earn it? That you are somehow unworthy of it?"

She didn't say anything; nothing needed to be said.

_I'm unworthy of a lot of things, but yeah; that's pretty high up on the list._

"Faith." He glanced upwards, as if checking the position of the sun in the sky. Of course it wasn't there, but she did catch a glimpse of the moon through the branches high overhead. He looked back down, and there was a trace of tension in him that hadn't been there before. Despite that, he spoke gently.

"The power comes to those who can bear it, those who possess the strength it requires to endure such a thing, but it is up to each Slayer to find that strength. You are worthy; not because you were destined to be so, but because you've grown to become so. You've-" He reached out to touch that dangling feather again, and this time she flinched away. He took his hand back, but his gaze never wavered. "-You've changed. This marks that change, nothing more."

She could have argued with him; she could be stubborn enough and then some, when the mood was on her, but she let it go.

"Well…. What am I going to do if I get back? I can't go around with these hanging off of me; wearing feathers in your hair went out in the eighties."

He smiled broadly at that, his teeth flashing white in the darkness.

"They've been there for quite some time and no one's seen them yet, have they? Well, so it will be once you leave here. Only those with the eyes to see will know they are there." He glanced up again, and the smile went away. "Faith, it is time. If you are going to do this, it needs be done now."

She looked at him in surprise.

"You mean I've got a choice? I can say no?"

He took a step back, giving her a little more room in which to stand.

"You do have a choice; you can act… or you can do nothing. You can seek self-knowledge, change, growth… or you can wait until dawn, and go back to things as they were."

That put a damper on the sudden hope she'd been feeling. Things back in Sunnydale had been bad enough that she'd had to leave. If the situation with Buffy, with Giles and Willow and the rest of them didn't get better, if it kept getting worse-

She didn't know what would happen, but given her past record it wasn't likely to be pretty. On the other hand, all she had to do to pass this test was to fight some big ol' lizard thing; sure, it was supposed to be big and bad, but she'd never lost a fight yet.

_Well, okay, there was Kakistos. But I ended up dusting him in the end, right? So I figure that leaves me as reigning champion in the Slayer-Class Ultimate Fighting Federation._

Hm. That would be the S.C.U.F.F. Weird. 

"Okay; count me in."

She'd thought he would be happy, but he just nodded, his face like iron. Silently he turned away, walking towards the path that had appeared earlier. Faith walked over to where her pack lay, leaning down to retrieve it.

"Leave it." She paused, looking at his back. It wasn't like there was anything irreplaceable in there, but still; she had so little, it was hard to let anything at all go. "It's alright; it's just that you won't need it. You can get it later."

_Yeah, if there_ is_ a later._

She let it lay, stopping just long enough to take one more drink from the spring. The water was just as good this time as it had been before, but something was nagging at her as she wiped her lips.

"The third thing." He was still standing at the path, still facing away from her. She stared at his back, noting the utter blackness of his braid. You would think that he would have at least a little gray, at his age. "You said that there were three things going on here. Me, searching for myself or whatever, that's one. The spirits needing me to help them before they help me, that's two." She walked over to stand beside him, her bare feet silent on the rough stone. "So; what's the third thing?"

Faith saw his shoulders slowly rise and fall, as if he'd taken a deep breath and then let it out.

"The third purpose which walks with us this night, is mine." Her eyebrows rose, and she watched as he turned to look at her. "I didn't have to be here, not for you to follow this course. The spirits showed you the vision, they would have led you where you needed to go."

"Then how come you're here?"

He reached out, and carefully flicked the lock of hair with its two black feathers back behind her shoulder.

"I came because I noticed your arrival here, because I saw something of interest within you… or at least its promise."

This was a new one, and she wasn't sure how to react.

"The promise of what?"

He shook his head.

"That…. That I'll tell you later."

Of course that only brought her earlier thought back to her, and this time she said it out loud.

"If there is a later."

He shrugged, and moved up the path.

"There's always a later, even if not all of us are here to see it arrive."

His feet didn't make any sound either, despite his antique sneakers.

"Yeah, yeah; white girl not laughing at Indian wisdom."

Before long, the clearing with the pool was lost somewhere behind them. They followed the path, and it didn't head down towards the lowlands, and the realm of humankind. Instead, it wound higher and higher, into the tree-shrouded mountains.

* * * * *


	5. Chapter 5

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Stars.

Faith stood perched on the rocky outcropping, which itself lay near the crest of a high, steep ridge, and stared upwards in wonder. Stars had never held much interest for her; within the confines of the big city you could only see a few of them, and what was the point in watching a bunch of little white dots in the sky, anyway? Even now, when she slept during the day and stayed up all night, every night, the Slayer seldom bothered to look upwards. There were too many things on the ground --and struggling up out of the ground-- that were looking to kill the first person they saw; walking around with your eyes on the sky was a good way to get whacked in a hurry.

Now, though…. She had never turned her new eyes, her wondrous, night-seeing Slayer's eyes upon the stars and really_ looked_. Not until tonight.

The stars weren't just white dots; they were blazing entities, shining blue-white or white-gold, red or orange or purple, deep gold or vibrant green; there were colors and hues for which she had no name. There were thousands upon thousands of brilliant points of light, along with swirls and veils of luminous, glittering dust that were so beautiful it made her heart ache.

The night sky overhead wasn't black, not to her. It was alive, glowing with a soft, ethereal light whose beauty far outstripped the harsh, obvious glare of the daytime sun.

_Fuck. How can a vamp miss the daylight, if they can see even half of what I see?_

Finally, reluctantly, she lowered her gaze. Below her lay mile after mile of forest, an ocean of dark green spreading out over a huge area. In the last few hours she and the old man had covered a lot of ground, climbing fairly high up into the Santa Lucia Range. With the increased altitude, the air was even cooler, and the view even better. Faith wasn't sure how far she could see from where she stood, but it was a long, long way. And despite that, as she stood looking down, there was almost no sign of a human presence there at all. Far off to her right and maybe ten miles from where she stood, there was a tiny cluster of lights visible; a little town or something, probably. Other than that, the only thing that proved man lived on the face of the earth at all was the barely-visible strand of moving lights in the far distance; the highway she'd been traveling on early that day.

_Wow. It's like--_ She tried to complete the thought, but faced with all that emptiness, it was like her brain was half-frozen by the sheer immensity of it. All her life had been spent in cities where the horizon was delineated by the buildings a block or two away; even while on her journey to Sunnydale, she'd spent most of her time cooped up inside cars and trucks, blocked off from the vastness of the open plains. Never in her life had she seen anything like this, and it was a bit of a shock. _-I always thought of places like this, the wild places, as just little islands surrounded by houses and streets and big buildings; like the parks and vacant lots back home. This, though… this is big enough to swallow someone without even noticing them. And I know that there's things out there, like bits and pieces of this place that are alive, and awake, and not real impressed with human beings._

"That's true." The voice came out of the not-darkness, and Faith turned her head to look.

The old man was standing a little ways off, lower than where she stood but still on the crest of the ridge that separated the flatlands down below from the high valley on the other side. He'd been walking slowly around ever since they'd reached the summit, peering here and there as if he were trying to find something. Now, though, he was standing with his arms folded, and staring out towards the distant lights.

"You people think you've tamed it, that just because you don't have wolves and bears and mountain lions prowling through your streets, that the wild has been beaten." He glanced up at her, and she could see the gleam of his black eyes even across the distance between them. "That's just plain stupidity. You don't 'beat' something this big, this old, not even if you end up paving over every damned foot of ground. You learn how to live with it, you treat it with respect, or else eventually it'll answer back what you did to it, and then…." He shrugged. "Well, let's just say that Mt. Saint Helens thing was just a warm-up; and I'm not sure how you or the other one'd go about Slaying something like that."

Faith looked out over the immense forest one last time, and she couldn't help feeling like it was aware of her; watching, judging… waiting to see what this little girl with the tattoo and the attitude was going to do tonight….

She turned away, leaping off the outcropping to land lightly in the knee-high grass. Walking towards him, she shook her head.

"You know, you can be a scary old bastard, when you want to be."

He grinned at her, seeming pleased.

"You think so?" Chuckling softly, he started again on his investigation of the area. "Thank you. I'll admit that some folks 'round these parts used to consider me a bit of a bad-luck omen; 'harbinger of bad times' and all that." He'd found a long stick somewhere, and used it to poke about in some bushes that grew along the rocks.

The Slayer watched as he searched, her hands in her jacket pockets to keep them warm in the increasing chill.

"You know, you're not sticking to your story very good." It was cold enough now for her breath to fog a bit as she spoke. "Either you're just an old man or you're some kind of Indian boogey-man, back to cause some trouble. Which is it?"

He kept searching, not bothering to turn around.

"At this moment, I_ am_ an old man. Not a bad luck omen, not a denizen of the underworld, and not the thing under your bed neither, girl."

Faith cocked her head at him, not caring that he wasn't looking at her to see it.

"Uh huh. Well, whatever you are, you're screwing with me now." She nodded towards the undergrowth he was wading through. "You know perfectly well where to find whatever it is you're looking for, but you've been pretending not to for the last ten minutes. Why?"

The old man straightened, then turned around.

"You know, you're not as dumb as you go around thinking you are; Faith who slays vampires."

She quirked a smile at that, and half shrugged.

"Actually I just have a good bullshit detector." She kicked at the tall grass with one foot, indicating the direction he'd been searching in. "So how come the act? You were in a big hurry to get up here, but you've been fooling around for ten minutes while I stood up there and looked at the scenery. Why?"

His black eyes examined her for a moment, then he looked away.

"Maybe because it's scenery worth looking at, and you'd never had a chance to see it before." He glanced down at the stick he held, then thrust it vertically into the ground. The grass-covered earth under Faith's bare feet felt pretty hard, but the stick stayed where it was when the old man walked away. "And, if you're going to be half of what I think you'll be someday, you need to learn to see wider than you have up until now. A narrow focus is fine during battle, but sometimes you need to be able to step back and see beyond the reach of your spear."

He was walking purposefully now, along the spine of the ridge, and she started off after him. When she passed near the dead branch he'd stuck in the ground she started to pass it without a glance, but something made her stop and look.

It wasn't a dead stick anymore; it was a slender, living tree, with delicate little branches and a scattering of green leaves appearing even as she watched. A bit taken aback despite herself, she started walking again; not without frequent glances back behind her at the new tree. She was so busy looking behind her, and wondering what, exactly she was following around in the night, that she didn't notice the old man stop until she nearly ran into him.

Stepping back hastily, she looked up and saw his teeth flash in the darkness.

"Like I said; widen your focus a bit."

"Fuck you."

It slipped out by force of habit, before she could stop it, but he just laughed and gestured to the side. Faith looked, and let out a groan.

"Man, don't tell me; there's grave-robbing too?"

A stony bank, like a rough cliff only a few feet high, ran alongside them on the left. The rocky face right where they stood was gouged and torn, as if someone had been at it with digging tools. Mounds of loose stone were still scattered around, but the biggest piles were in front of five gaping holes that stared back at her like empty eye sockets. She crouched down and stared into one, and her nightvision let her clearly see the back of the cavity, only a few feet in from the opening.

The old man stood behind her, and when she glanced back at him she saw that he had stuffed his hands in his jean pockets and was surveying the scene with a look of scorn.

"Not graves; the People around here let their dead go back to the air and wind from which they came." His eyes flicked to hers, then to the hollows in the stone that lay exposed before them. "These were for the storage of relics; of items the tribe considered too important to risk being lost or stolen."

Dusting off her hands on her pants, Faith straightened.

"Well, I guess that plan didn't work out too good, did it?"

"No, and therein lies the danger." He walked to where the ridge dropped away in a steep slope; not on the side towards the highway, where Faith had been looking earlier, but on the other side. She followed after, and the two of them gazed downwards.

On this side, the ground dropped only a thousand feet or so, slanting down in a series of thickly forested slopes, until it reached the shores of a mountain lake. The water glittered darkly in the moonlight, stretching off to either side a mile or more. Past the lake, the far slopes rose to the first true mountains in the Range, easily two or three times the height of the foothill upon which they now stood.

The old man extended one arm, pointing slightly downwards, and off to the left. Faith followed the line of his finger, while making the internal adjustment to increase the sensitivity of her nightvision. At those levels the lights from the resort lodge at the far end of the lake were a painful glare, but that was not what drew her attention. There, tucked into the trees just near the water's edge, a single flame was burning. A campfire, maybe.

She gave her guide a sidelong look.

"Okay, I see it. What's down there?"

The old man was already in motion, picking his way down the steep incline.

"Better if you see it. Come; there isn't much time."

With a grumble of annoyance, Faith followed after him.

* * * * *

She'd seen enough trees to last her the rest of her short life; big ones, little ones, with smooth bark or with rough. Trees, trees, and yet more trees. The night beneath the ones where she walked now was no darker than it had been anywhere else, but something about these particular shadows was making her feel uneasy. It was very much the opposite of the calm, comforting sense she'd gotten from the clearing with the pool, or even the site where the hidden chambers had been plundered. This place was somehow unclean; it took real effort just to let her bare feet come into contact with the ground here without flinching.

Despite her unease, Faith slipped quietly through the brush, just a few feet behind the old man. Up ahead, the light from the fire flickered at them through the closely-spaced trunks.

_Old man…. The old geezer never did tell me his actual name, did he?_

She opened her mouth to ask, but before she even made a sound his whisper floated back to her.

"'Old Man' will do just fine." She scowled, and opened her mouth again. "No, Faith. And before you get all pissy about it, maybe you want to tell me_ your_ last name, eh?" She said nothing, and the backlit silhouette of his head turned towards her. "That's what I thought. Now, be quiet for a minute, and let's get close enough for you to see what they're up to."

Faith gritted her teeth and did as she was told; a first, as far as she could recall. Fortunately it took somewhat less than a minute for the two of them to reach a position where they could look through a half-bare thicket and see what was going on at the lake's shore.

The fire she'd seen from the ridge wasn't just a campfire; it was a bonfire, with flames reaching nearly ten feet into the air. In its light a dozen or so figures in robes were in the middle of some sort of ritual. She'd only just begun sorting out the details of what she was seeing when something happened.

One of the participants, chanting quietly along with the others, moved to a large, lumpy object that lay before the fire. At his approach, the object heaved, making Faith jump slightly in startlement. She squinted, trying to make sense of the thing laying there in the flickering light.

_A deer._ She realized suddenly. It raised its head and the large, spreading antlers gleamed palely. _It's a white deer; a_ big _white deer._

And it was big; if it hadn't been bound up with what looked like a hundred loops of heavy rope, it would have stood taller than the man in front of it. The man, with his big, shiny knife.

"-to our call. You, whose essence is death, taste now the death of this forestlord, and awake."

Faith rose slightly, her hands balled into fists.

"He is _not_ going to-"

Her whispered words of denial did not stop the knife from flashing downwards and opening a huge gash across the animal's throat. Faith groaned, looking away with an image of dark blood staining white fur still filling her vision. The feel of the place, that air of unease she'd sensed on their approach, grew suddenly more intense. She turned to where the old man was crouched next to her, watching the proceedings with an air of sour distaste.

"All right; what's going on?" She demanded.

He looked over at her, looking faintly surprised.

"I thought sure you'd have put it together by now, girl." He waved a hand in the direction of the firelight. "These folks are all set to let loose that SpiritBeast from your dream."

She sat back, feeling more than a little off-balance.

"Well, damn." Her fingers played over the stake that was still in her belt, all ready to be drawn and plunged into someone's heart at a moment's notice. Staring at him, she reluctantly took her hand away. The old man watched as she did so, a puzzled frown drawing deep furrows between his eyebrows.

"What were you thinking this was, eh?"

Faith sighed.

"I thought it was already loose." She admitted, glancing away for a moment before one again meeting the disturbing blackness of his eyes. "I thought it was you."

His look of stunned amazement was almost funny. Almost.

"Me!?" He leaned closer to her, studying her face as if to find answers there. "Why the hell would you think something like that?"

She sat upright again, darting a glance towards the fire lit clearing to make sure nobody there had heard their whispers. It seemed unlikely; with a dozen people chanting, and the fire itself crackling loudly, the robe society was oblivious to the pair hidden just a few yards away. Faith turned her attention back to the shadowed figure in front of her, still half angry with him… but also more than a little relieved.

"Well, why shouldn't I think it was you?" She asked, plaintively. "You're not just some guy wandering around in the woods, no matter what you say. You're reading my thoughts half the time, and lookin' at me with those freaky eyes." The eyes in question blinked, and she sighed. "And, well; even with all of that stuff, you're being kinda nice to me. Nobody who does that is ever on the level; they all want something, they always have something up their sleeve. So I was all set to kill you as soon as you started to turn into something big and ugly."

The old Indian stared at her in silence for what seemed like a long time. Beyond the thicket, the chanting continued.

"-By the fires of the hearth you were banished; by fire shall you be set free!"

A second source of light blossomed amid the robed figures, and Faith took that as an excuse to look away. One of the participants in the ritual had something in his hand; it was the firedrill from her dream. He had apparently just used it to ignite a small blaze near the carcass of the white deer, and now stood over it chanting syllables in a language she couldn't understand.

"Faith." She looked back at the man crouched beside her. He was close enough for her to see the concern in his face, and she had to look away. "Listen to me, please. I'm not the creature you're here to fight; that's what is being summoned out there right now. As for the rest… it's true; I do want something from you."

She was still determinedly studying the scene around the fire when long bony fingers took gentle hold of her chin and forced her head to turn towards him.

"I want something from you, but I'm not trying to trick you into doing it. I'm not the liar some of the People always thought me to be." He looked sincere enough, but then, except for the eyes he looked human enough, too.

"Okay, what do you want?" Her voice was full of rust, husky and rough with suppressed emotion.

"Nothing that is beyond your ability to give. Nothing that would, of itself, harm you in any way."

At the qualifier her eyes narrowed, and she began to ask just what about the situation _would_ manage to harm her, but another voice called out from the clearing.

"By this spear, and by a Warrior's courage were you banished," The figure brandished the long, primitive spear from her vision. Despite passing time the shaft remained straight and true, and the blade glittered strangely in the light of the fire. "But Man's courage is a thing of the past, and the spear is cast down! Be now set free!" The man dropped the spear next to the small fire his companion had started, and then stepped back.

Faith sighed, and started to stand up.

"Hang on a sec, will ya? I need to go and beat the crap out of these guys before they finish."

She started off, but he grabbed her arm from behind.

"Sit down!" She hesitated, and he kept tugging at her until she hunkered down again.

"What? I thought you wanted me to stop these guys."

He shook his head impatiently.

"It's too late for that. Once they began, the working which contained the creature began to fray. If they are not allowed to finish the conjuring, it will still manage to free itself, but at a time and place that is nearly impossible to predict." She leaned back against a handy tree-trunk, absorbing that, as the slow beat of a drum rang out through the night, and another voice spoke above it.

"By the sounds of life, by the sounds of the People were you banished." It was a woman's voice, and the bitterness in it was painful to hear. The drumbeats came slowly, each one an isolated event which was no part of any rhythm. "But now the People have all but vanished, and the sounds which have replaced their songs are those of hate, destruction, and stupidity." The woman all but spat the words, and the beats she called from the drum were flat and harsh. "Return, and erase the mistake which is man! Be now free!"

Faith observed the situation there for a moment longer, then turned her attention back to her companion.

"Okay then; I'll wait and kill the horrible beast once it shows." She hooked her thumb back over her shoulder, indicating the gathering in the clearing beyond. "How about telling me just what these people are after here, anyway? It sounds like that lady really means business."

The old man nodded in somber agreement.

"She does; they all do. These are Witches, but they are using rites and calling upon powers that should never be essayed by mortals." He shifted slightly, pointing to the white deer which was still twitching slightly as the last of its blood trickled from its slashed throat into the muddy puddle before it. "That, for example. Blood magic is bad enough; a heinous brand of sorcery that will inevitably bring harm back upon those who enact it. This, though-" His voice thickened slightly, and she looked at him in surprise. "-This was no simple animal. It was a spirit of the forest; one of the linchpins which hold the great wheel in its course. For it to die as part of the natural order is fitting and proper; it would be reborn with the coming of the dawn. But for it to be brought into this, for its vital energies to be used to bridge the void and contact the SpiritBeast…." He turned to face her. "Such actions scar the world forever; there is no healing from a wound such as that… and the wild is diminished just a little more."

Another of the rogue Witches had moved forward and was speaking, a glowing object hanging from his neck.

"-and the glow of the moon, they stood against the shadow. The light of their souls stood against the dark, and banished you." He raised his hand, and took the leather thong from around his neck, the glowing stone swaying from it. "No longer does man oppose the shadow; he has embraced it. Let him be consumed by the darkness he would serve." The man tossed the stone into the bloody mud beside the slain deer, and it hit with a sickening squelching sound, its light vanishing in that same instant. "Be now free!"

The very night seemed to shudder, and Faith had to swallow bile before looking at the old man.

"That leaves one more; talk fast."

He, too, had been watching the ritual, the firelight painting strange and shifting patterns on his careworn face.

"They think they are doing good, that they are saving the earth from defilement by mankind." He sighed, turning towards her. "For one reason or another, each of them has decided that humans must be cleansed from the earth, that the entire race is unfit to live. And so; this."

Faith felt her eyes grow wide.

"So, um; these guys aren't planning on taking over or anything?"

"No. They don't care about conquering anything, they don't want to rule anything." He looked over at her, and the Slayer was astonished to see a certain amount of of sympathy there; of understanding for the Witches who were about to unleash so much death. "These people don't care about anything but their pain; and the need to see 'justice' done. When the SpiritBeast is freed, then they will be the first to die. The first of many; and they accept that as a price they're willing to pay in order to accomplish their goal… the destruction of the people, the very society that's wronged them."

She thought she might vomit right then and there; either as a result of the increasingly bad vibes coming from the lakeshore, or because the stakes involved in her little 'quest' were suddenly a lot higher than she'd thought.

"But-" She had to swallow before she could find her voice again. "This, though; the thing they're bringing through. It can't kill everybody, can it?"

_That's right, folks. World-wide Armageddon, brought to you by Slayer #2._

"No; it can't kill everyone." She sagged a little in relief, but he kept on going, his tone remorseless. "What it can do is turn everything within a hundred miles of this spot into desert; as it did with the land you now call the Mojave." He paused, looking thoughtful. "Actually, with the Hellmouth now active within that radius, it may be able to do even worse. If it can tap that power, and use it to strengthen itself, then many millions of humans might die before the guardian powers could contain it."

She reached out, grabbing hold of his hands with her own and squeezing hard.

"You gotta help me; you're some kind of magic too, right?" It wasn't so much that she was afraid of what she'd be fighting, as it was fear of failing. This was too much for one little runaway to handle, what this called for was-

_The Slayer. The_ real _one, not the substitute._

"Please; make it stop."

Slowly, with care, he pulled his hands free.

"I'm sorry, but I cannot. If I interfere directly, it would free others to do so as well." He stood up, and moved a pace back. "I've done all I can, in bringing you here; in speaking to you. The rest is your task."

"By Medicine ancient and strong were you banished, by that Medicine you are called back again."

Faith closed her eyes, listening as the final words were spoken by the robed lunatics.

_All I want to do is run away, but that's how I got here in the first place, isn't it? Running away from Kakistos, running away from Buffy. I've gotta try and get hold of myself, here. I've gotta be strong._

"Man's time is ended; come, cleanse the plague from our mother earth that she may begin again!"

_I can do this. I can't be as smart as Willow, or as perfect a Slayer as Buffy, but I can do this. I can be strong enough, and brave enough, and… well, stupid enough to fight this thing. I don't want to die, but I don't want to go out as a coward, either._

Faith stood up, and this time the old man didn't stop her. Out by the fire, in the middle of the loose circle outlined by the gathered witches, something was forming. A darkness; a black shape that even her vision couldn't resolve with any clarity was welling up and taking form. Details were impossible to pick out, but it gave the impression of a reptile; chunky and powerful, far larger than a horse but with a strange, sinuous grace that showed as its head swiveled back and forth, surveying the area.

"This is your test, Faith, your quest." The old Indian wasn't looking at the creature, he was looking at her. "You are here to learn something about yourself; do that, and you may yet defeat this abomination."

Faith nodded, gazing at the SpiritBeast. Somehow, she had the feeling that it was aware of her presence there. As she watched, it hissed, dragging a massively-clawed forefoot through the bloody earth. A black shimmer ran along the side nearest her; gleaming scales like small plates of obsidian. Its tail thrashed back and forth, and long, sharp teeth snapped at the air.

_Lookie here, mom. Your little girl Faith is going to slay a dragon._

Her body trembling, but her resolve firm, she stepped forward, through the foliage and into the fire lit clearing.

The Slayer had come to do battle.

* * * * *


	6. Chapter 6

_God, look at how_ big_ this thing is!_

The Witches, many of them with the hoods of their robes fallen back to reveal their faces, stood in a loose circle around the reptilian SpiritBeast. The expressions on their faces ranged from grim satisfaction for some, stunned awe for others, and for a few the operative word looked to be 'terror'. For its part the creature was all but ignoring the humans who had summoned it back from its long exile. All of its attention was focused on the girl who was now approaching.

Faith stepped into the clearing, and as she did so a jolt ran through her, like waves of ants scuttling over every nerve. There was power here; power they'd raised with their bloody ritual and whatever had come before it, and then channeled into calling this... thing. The act of conjuring hadn't used up the magic, though. It still hung there in the air; thick and potent, and as malevolent as the creature itself. It swirled around the Slayer as she moved forward, resisting her entry into the area the witches had consecrated for their task, drawing a dim amber glow from her skin as the energies there reacted with the forces that dwelt within her.

The SpiritBeast hissed, but it was an older woman, her voice crackling with authority, who called out.

"Beware! This one has some manner of power about her." She gestured to those standing nearest her. "She must not be allowed to interfere, or-"

Not caring to let the woman complete her speech, Faith was already in motion. She charged forward; not towards the reptilian creature, not yet, anyway.

_No fucking way I'm going to throw punches and kicks at that thing, and a stake's not any better. I need-_

--A weapon. She needed a weapon, and there was really only one choice available to her at the moment. There, on the far side of the circle, lay the ancient spear that had been a part of the old ritual when the thing had been banished, and also a part of this ritual, where it had been called back. Faith moved fast, staying low and circling wide around the SpiritBeast, diving towards where the artifact lay. She tried her best to reach it, but one of the witches had seen her start into motion; he'd realized where she was going, and had also lunged for the weapon. Faith was far faster, but she'd also had nearly forty feet of ground to cross in order to reach it... and the man had only to cover five. He snatched it up before her hands could close on the wooden shaft, and even as she turned the momentum of her dive into a roll to her feet, he was lashing out at her.

Faith whirled to face him while at the same time skipping back, trying to gain some fighting room, but the blood that had soaked the ground around the white stag made the footing there difficult, and she nearly fell. The man lunged, driving the spear at her chest, and she was forced to block it aside with a forearm, taking a painful slice from the razor-sharp blade as she did so. Ancient or not, the weapon still seemed functional enough... which was why she wanted it for herself. Beyond her adversary, Faith caught a glimpse of the supernatural being the rogue coven had called forth. With what attention she could spare from the man who was trying to kill her, she watched as the creature suddenly lashed out.

_Wow,_ Faith thought, even as she ducked beneath a frenzied slash of the spear. _In my dream it seemed so_ slow_; it never had a chance to do anything before they banished it. It sure looks fast enough now._

The shadowy entity was so fast in fact, that its first victim never even saw death coming for her. A gleam of moonlight upon a mass of glittering obsidian, a crash of teeth meeting teeth, and the robed woman's lower torso and legs fell away; the rest of her was simply gone. A thick, snake-like tongue emerged briefly from its mouth, licking a few drops of stray blood from its chin... and then it turned towards Faith.

The Slayer had been backpedaling already, trying to keep some distance between herself and the man wielding the spear. Now she turned and ran, slipping and struggling a bit as the bloody mud betrayed her yet again. On her hands and knees for just an instant before she could surge back upright, something round and hard moved in the mud beneath her palm. Acting on instinct, she closed her fingers around the object as she lunged forward, just inches ahead of those gleaming, snapping teeth. A startled shout from behind her proved that the man with the spear was a bit surprised at the creature's sudden appearance right in front of him, but Faith wasn't worrying about that right now. Instead, she scrambled around one arc of the clearing, running past a pair of the witches on her way towards a gap in the trees. She could run away, maybe even lose the large Beast within the twisting and turning confines of a forest trail. She could....

_Run away? No, I didn't come here to run away._ Screams came from just behind her, and she spun in place to see the two people between herself and the SpiritBeast being ripped into bloody, messy pieces. Even as it gloried in the slaughter of its victims, the creature's attention remained firmly fixed upon Faith. She couldn't help the little shiver of fear that went through her, but she did her best to push the sense of dread back down. _I came here to kill this thing; to prove that I matter, that I'm more than just Buffy's shadow. _

The object in her hand finally registered, and she glanced down.

The stone; the stone the child had been wearing around his neck in her dream. It had glowed then, glowed with the light of the boy's soul, and that light had seemed to weaken the Beast. Faith hastily wiped the mud off of the thing as best she could, then raised it towards the creature.

"Hey!" It stared at her; of_ course_ it stared at her. Despite its apparent lack of any eyes with which to see, it had been focused on her ever since she'd shown up. "All right, back off! Or else...." The stone wasn't glowing. She paused, looking at it, then giving it an experimental shake. It didn't glow, it didn't rattle, or do much of anything except sit there like a dumb chunk of rock. Faith's eyes rose back to the SpiritBeast. It had finished dismembering the cultists to its satisfaction, and now lowered its head in preparation for another rush towards her. Not wasting any time with futile curses, she dropped the stone's cord around her neck, crouched, and when the demonic thing scuttled forward she threw herself to one side.

She had to get a weapon from somewhere, and the spear was still the only option she had. There, across from her, the same man still had it. There were a couple of the other witches between Faith and where he stood, but they wouldn't slow her down much. She bounded forward, aware that the creature was coiling itself behind her.

Then, without any warning, the SpiritBeast _breathed_.

Darkness rolled forth like a cloud, engulfing her; darkness that filled the area around her body, cutting off all light from the bonfire, from the moon, everything. Darkness both utter and complete surrounded her... but it was nothing compared to the darkness that enfolded her mind.

_No light. No light to see, no light from me. That stone, I remember the dream; the light it gives off comes from the soul of the one who holds it, right? It was blinding-bright when the kid had it, it even glowed some when that crazy witch-guy was using it to call the monster back. But when I had it in my hand, there was nothing at all._

There's nothing in me; no soul, no love, no nothing. Where does your soul come from, anyway? Your parents? My father gave me nothing; he didn't even stick around long enough to see me get born. And my mother? What a joke; anything I got from her is diseased, twisted, poisoned. No wonder no one wants me. No wonder everyone uses me. Why the fuck am I even trying to fight this thing, what'll it accomplish even if I were to beat it somehow?

What's a hollow, broken thing like me good for?

Light returned to her eyes. Faith blinked, seeing again the clearing, the firelight, the witches... except the two closest to her, the ones just ahead, were no longer standing. Instead, they lay twitching on the ground, their eyes wide and staring, with silent tears flowing down their faces.

It was hard, so very hard to make herself move, but she managed to stumble forward.

_That--_ A violent convulsion wracked her, nearly sending Faith to her knees, but she weathered it and kept going. _That was some kind of magical attack; it tried to suck the will right outta me, like it did these guys. _She leapt over them, heading for the spear. _Well, no dice, dude. So what if I'm not all bright and shiny on the inside? I know what I came from, I know what I am. I might not like it, but whining and crying don't change anything._

She was maybe ten feet away from the man holding the spear, but her hesitation had cost her. She heard something large and fast moving behind her, she felt the ground tremble slightly as it came, and she spun to face her foe.

What she saw was a mouthful of long, wicked teeth coming straight for her, and all she could do was try to dodge, try to block. What she ended up doing was a little of both.

How do you dodge something big enough around to swallow you whole? How do you block aside something that is larger than your entire body?

Faith nearly got out of the thing's path, but not quite. She used her right arm to try and block the Beast's head up and to the side, but it massed so much more than she did that what she actually managed was to thrust her own body off to her left, just clearing the lighting-fast snapping of those massive jaws. In those close quarters her instincts took hold, and she fired a punch into the side of that sinuous neck, torquing herself around and putting all the whipcord strength of her body into the blow.

Her fist struck the shimmering black scales-- and bounced off, leaving her to stumble back with a grunt of pain. It felt like she'd rammed her knuckles against a wall of solid iron. Supple, flexible iron to be sure, but still iron. She circled the creature, which had apparently paused to ponder the improbability of someone attempting to fight it barehanded.

_You're right to be confused, big guy. Nobody sane would ever think_ that_ would work. I need that fucking-_

She looked down at one of the men who'd been caught in the black breath. He didn't have anything visibly weapon-like, but what he did have clutched in his hands was one of the ancient artifacts; specifically, the old Shaman's medicine pouch. Instantly, she was down on one knee and ripping in from the drooling man's grasp.

_Okay, maybe I can make _this one _work._

Problem was, she had no idea what it was supposed to do, much less how to turn the damned thing on. Just holding it didn't seem to be doing anything, and the flap on top was tied shut with some kind of monster knot.

_Should I just rip it open? Wonder what's in there?_

The SpiritBeast suddenly lunged at her again, surprising her with the reach that its long serpent-neck gave its bite. She escaped by throwing herself flat and rolling, not away, where it could have reached her more easily, but towards it. In a bare half-second she was up against its forelegs, and again, when she saw an opening her ingrained Slayer reflexes got the better of her. Rolling onto her back, she brought both knees up against her chest, then uncoiled a double kick straight up, driving her bare feet into the thing's throat with all her might. The sheer force of the blow raised the creature's front feet off the ground for a moment, but again the thick scales and the dense layer of muscle beneath them prevented any damage to the thing. It arched its neck and brought that gaping maw down towards her, but she was on her feet and slipping down alongside the length of its body.

Just because there didn't seem to be anything better to try, she swung the pouch at the Beast's armored side. Predictably it bounced off, doing nothing.

_Well, fuck a duck! Would somebody please sell me a break, here?!_

She ran past the thing's hindquarters, leaping a good five feet into the air to avoid the vicious sideways slash of the thick tail as she did so. She came down running, and was maybe seven or eight paces beyond it, looking for the spear again, when she heard a voice call out from somewhere to her right.

"Thicken!"

--At which point Faith ran headlong into something invisible, immovable, and very, very hard. She bounced off of whatever it was, tried to catch her balance and failed, instead sitting down with a solid -thump-. Her cheek and forehead had taken the brunt of the impact, and there was quite a bit of pain. She was still struggling to her feet when her brain started working again.

_Wha--? What was that?_ She evaded the creature's next lunge, still trying to circle towards the far side of the clearing.

"Thicken!"

This time she was forewarned, at least enough to put out an arm and absorb some of her momentum. It still knocked the breath out of her, and she wasted a few precious seconds running her hands over the invisible wall before her.

_Magic?_ Her eyes found a robed woman standing not far away, a pleased smirk twisting her otherwise pleasant features. Faith's eyes narrowed. _Magic._ Without thinking, she swung the pouch at the barrier before her... and there was a brilliant splash of white sparks. Feeling the rush from behind her, the Slayer threw herself forward, and found the wall gone. Sidestepping the Beast, Faith ran at the woman.

"Thick-"

Too slow, and an arm like a steel bar clotheslined the witch across the throat, sending her flying off into the darkness. It was very possible that the woman was badly injured as a result of that blow, but Faith was too busy just then to go and check on her.

_Sorry about that, but them's the breaks when you go looking for trouble. Now, if I could just use this pouch to stop Blackie here. Maybe I could make him eat it?_

Unbelievably, despite the fact that several of their number were down, and a couple of them had been partially eaten, the rest of the witches were still in the clearing. Several of them, standing over by the bonfire, had even taken up some kind of chant, obviously up to more magical stuff to complicate Faith's life.

_I guess that's why they call 'em 'Fanatics', huh?_

The SpiritBeast was stalking towards her again, and there was a sickly-green luminescence growing around the chanters across the way. It sort of looked like a smaller, abbreviated version of their summoning ritual, and if there was one thing Faith didn't need at the moment, it was another magical entity trying to eat her. She leaned back, doing her best to imitate the stance of a major-league pitcher, then whipped the pouch at the circle of magicians. It flew more or less true, taking one of the robed figures right in the face. Whether because of that distraction, or because of some magic-disrupting property of the pouch itself, the green glow flashed suddenly brighter, shrieked like a power-saw about to explode, and then vanished. The four people who had been chanting each clutched at their heads and collapsed.

Faith had time to grin in relief before she saw the Beast open its mouth wide. It was too far away to reach her with a bite, so she didn't realize her danger at first.

Not until it breathed, and that breath took her like an ebony tidal wave.

_Terror rushing through her, breaking over her in a wash of blackness, cutting off sight, cutting off hope. There was no way she could beat this thing; her best punches just bounced off, everything she tried just bounced off. This slow, ineffectual struggle was like a nightmare, running in slow motion but never gaining any ground, the thing chasing after her getting closer and closer, like Kakistos had gotten closer and closer, following her, ready to do to her what he'd done to Annabella, what she'd been unable to keep him from doing to her only friend, the only real Watcher she would ever have. He'd proven that she was no match for him, that she was no match for anyone. What good were her pathetic powers when there were things out there like him, and like this thing, roaming the earth and waiting for thousands of years for her to come along only to die here, alone like this? What was a Slayer, one frightened little girl, going to do against something so ancient that it remembered the glaciers which had once covered the continent?_

Back again, her eyes at last finding the man with the spear. She ran towards him, circling wide around the creature, struggling on legs still unsteady from what the that breath attack had done to her.

_Wrong; so very wrong if you think you can scare me away. I_ beat_ Kakistos in the end, remember? I dusted his ass, wiped him away like a bad dream. Yeah, I'm just one girl, but I'm a Slayer, and we've been around for a lot longer than you have, Mr. SpiritBeast. Just let me get my hands on-_

The spear. Finally, it was within reach. Faith was tired of screwing around, so when the man thrust at her face with the weapon she didn't even try to dodge. Instead, her hand snapped out, catching hold of the shaft just behind the flint and copper blade. Holding it away from her, she pivoted on one foot and took the man across the face with an outside-in kick to his jaw which threw him to the ground in an unconscious heap. Spinning the spear in her hands like a quarterstaff, she had an instant where she nearly thrust it down and into his back. The visual of herself doing it, the rage at the stupid little man who had come close to getting her killed just because he himself wanted to badly to die... the strength of that image frightened her a little. She shoved that feeling away as she turned to face the reptillian horror.

Forget about that; it's just the adrenaline talkin', I'm no murderer.

Faith moved forward, willing now to press the attack. The SpiritBeast obliged her, flowing forward like a finely-articulated tank made of darkness.

She made the first move, darting in and ducking low, the spear flickering out to strike it along the side of its head. It was a light, glancing blow, and she wasn't too surprised that it didn't penetrate. A little disappointed, sure, but not surprised.

_It woulda been nice to see it just keel over once I touched it with this thing, but no such luck. Well, I can do it the old-fashioned way, too._

The spear balanced lightly in her hands, feeling right and natural there. She slid smoothly to her left, circling clockwise as the thing continued to advance in its straightforward fashion. She struck again, probing at the place where an eye would be if the thing had possessed any, but again the sharp spear tip glanced off. The Beast responded instantly, uncoiling its neck and snapping at her. She bounced back a pace to stay out of range, but it followed up immediately, rushing forward and biting at her again. Faith countered by leaping forward and up, passing over the snapping maw and landing atop its head. Balancing there, she slammed the point of the spear downwards at the very center of its skull, with both her strength and her weight behind it. The metal and flint tip of the weapon found a gap between the smaller scales there, and the Slayer was rewarded by a hiss of pain from the creature. She drew back the spear and was about to strike home again, but the Beast rolled, trying to crush her beneath it. Lost in the rush of combat, Faith was all but dancing atop the massive body, her feet moving quickly to keep her on top as it turned over beneath her.

_Yes! First blood goes to me, you fucker!_

Somewhere on its belly there was bound to be a thin spot, a weak point in the thing's armor plating. She was waiting for it to appear, ready to drive her weapon home and finish the battle... when the Beast's massive forelimb came slashing across at her, moving much faster than anything so large should ever be able to travel. She was almost quick enough, almost flexible enough to contort her body out of the way.

Almost, but not quite. The impact felt like a car had struck her; a car equipped with long, sharp talons mounted on the front grille. Faith flew through the darkness, and when she struck the ground she bounced twice and then lay still.

_Ow. That... hurt._

Her eyes were open, she knew who she was and what was happening; she just needed a second to get her wind back. She could see that she still held the spear, for all the good it was likely to do her. Only the very tip of the weapon, maybe an inch or so of the blade, was marked with the thing's dark blood. That had been her best shot, and this was all she had to show for it.

_What else? What can I try now?_

With a groan she struggled to her hands and knees, wincing at the pain in her left side.

_Feels like maybe a couple of ribs gave way, there. I'm bleeding a little, too._

Her side was slick with blood, but the wound wasn't too bad. Faith started to rise, but froze in place as a completely unexpected pain blossomed in her side. Against her will a little groan slipped past her lips as she tried to curl up around the agony. It was coming from her side, and for a moment, as she struggled to draw a breath, she wondered if a broken rib had pierced her lung.

_N-no; it's not that._ She thought, managing to pull air past the pain in small sips. _It's more of a burning, like somebody poured acid on me. _Beneath her hand, the torn flesh of her wound felt hot, the blood there already thick and sticky, like it was coagulating, or rotting, rather than clotting. As the pain began to move slowly outwards from that point, it left behind it a numbness, as if the flesh there was already dead. Faith stared across the clearing at the creature, and then she knew.

_Poison. The bastard poisoned me._

Lying on the ground as she was, she could feel the taint in the very soil of the clearing. With every step the SpiritBeast took, with every contact of its taloned feet upon the living earth, it spread its venom. The old man had said that the creature could make all of this a desert. She'd assumed that it would have to go around and rip up each tree one by one; but obviously that wasn't the case.

_This doesn't change anything. I'm a Slayer; normal poison can't kill me, even this stuff can't kill me quick. All I have to do is keep going, and take it down before I go. _

She got one leg under her, watching as the monster ceased rolling about, and slowly regained its own footing. It shook its head a little, an awkwardly powerful paw wiping at the top of its skull where she had wounded it. She supposed that if it had had eyes, it would have been glaring at her in annoyance right about now.

_Hokay then, I've managed to piss it off. At least I've achieved something for my trouble._

Her every instinct was driving her to charge forward and attack again, to strike and strike until something gave way and she either won or was killed while trying. Going out fighting was better than just waiting around for the poison to finish her. She actually started forward again, too, lips curling back before a scream of defiance. Until, that is, she caught sight of something off to the side.

The drum. It lay on its side, the carved patterns which adorned it gleaming in the firelight.

_Even I can play a drum, a little. Maybe it'll do something-_

No; she wasn't to be given the chance. Another of the damned, robe-wearing, death-seeking, tree-hugging psychotics had snatched up the artifact. With a crazed grin at Faith, he turned and flung the drum far out into the lake, where it splashed in the dark water.

"You stupid motherfu-"

Anger gave her fresh determination; if all she had was the physical option, then she was going to hammer at the Beast until one of them was dead. She whirled to face it once more, she started towards it....

And it breathed.

_Blackness; the deep, silent, utter blackness that fills the grave surrounded her, buried her. Death was close by, she could feel it watching, waiting, leaning casually against one of the trees out there and checking its wristwatch while she struggled against an unbeatable foe, quietly muttering 'Okay, all right, you're a very brave little Slayer, but come on already, I've got a schedule to keep'. The cold futility of it struck at her suddenly. Why fight? Why, this minute, this second, keep fighting, when it was so inevitable that even if by some miracle she managed to survive, sooner or later -likely sooner-she would be in the middle of a fight like this one... and lose. There was no way out for her, none at all. No matter what she did, there would always be another battle, and one after that, and another after that, onwards and onwards until she finally went down._

And then-nothing. She believed in nothing, she was nothing... she would become... nothing. So why even bother prolonging things? Letting go now, giving up now, would just eliminate a lot of pointless pain and suffering. She could skip all that, jump ahead to the end right now, no fuss, no bother, just a calm and rational decision to bring things to their logical, foregone conclusion.

What possible reason was there to do otherwise?

"Because that's not who I am!" She screamed, her voice breaking as the darkness ended and she stumbled forwards. She glared at the Beast, and her trembling arms raised the spear. "Because no matter what happens, no matter what you all do to me, or how you hurt me, or trick me, or tease me, or...." She raked the hair back from her face, dragging in air in deep gulps before continuing, the words tearing out of her like hoarsely-whispered razors. "Because no matter what, I'm not going to give you the satisfaction of beating me."

Because there was nothing else, Faith did what she knew how to do. She attacked.

In a flurry of strikes, she drove the spear into the creature, trying again and again to find a weakness, a vulnerable point.

There was none.

She circled it, using her speed and agility to evade its attacks, hoping against hope that it would grow weary and give her some unforeseen opportunity.

It didn't.

Faith tried an attack on the thing's mouth, figuring that it might be soft there even if it was not anywhere else. All she managed to do was draw sparks from the collision of the copper and flint of her weapon and the gleaming obsidian of the creature's teeth. When a third attempt there nearly resulted in the Beast biting off the spearhead, she drew back, breathing heavily and seriously feeling the pace she'd been holding. The poison, too, was making things difficult, spreading slowly through her chest, gradually making it harder to breathe, harder to move quickly....

_Gotta be something, gotta be some way to win this, some way I'm not seeing...._

Most of the witches were gone now; some of them dead, others unconscious, and a few seemed to have discovered some desire to live... especially after seeing the end their fellows had met at the jaws of the creature they had summoned. The bonfire still burned, the white stag still lay there dead, the sick, twisted power still filled the circle of the clearing.

And of course, the SpiritBeast itself still stood there; all but impervious to any attack she could muster, inexhaustible, implacable. Even now it was coming towards her again, slowly; much slower than she knew it could move, but of course it had all the time in the world to finish her, didn't it?

_Maybe it's just cautious. After all, I_ did _manage to hurt it that once, just a little. Not that this spear is going to do me much good._ She took a stance anyway, eyes flickering over the battleground as she weighed her possible moves. _None of this artifact stuff did me much good, did it? The stone was a total bust--_ She thumped the spear's haft against her chest, where the dull stone still hung from its cord. _-The pouch only worked against spells, not against this thing, and I lost it anyway. The spear is just letting me drag things out a little, I never even got to touch the drum. The firedrill-_

She stopped short, craning her head as she scanned the area again, looking for something in particular this time.

_The firedrill... is right over there._

She circled back that way, hoping that the demonic lizard wouldn't choose that particular moment to strike. Of course, as if her thought had been the trigger, it did exactly that. Rushing forward on smoothly-pumping legs, the thing lunged at her, mouth wide. The spear whirred in her hand, spinning about and then flicking forward, towards the exposed interior that it was presenting her. It stopped short, teeth clashing shut and causing the spearblade to rebound. Faith used the momentum, spinning her body half-around, bringing the butt end of the weapon up, over, and down with air-splitting speed. The resultant -Whack-reverberated from the encircling trees, and even though it inflicted no actual harm upon the Beast, the smack on its nose did seem to infuriate it. Crowding forward, it struck at her again, teeth tightly locked together, not biting but instead using its very head as a battering ram to crush her. The Slayer brought the spear up before her, clutched in both hands, and met the armored snout with the shaft held crossways and at the full extension of her arms. Even so, the impact flung her backwards, sending fresh agony lancing through her bruised, torn and poisoned side and momentarily overcoming the growing numbness there. Her hands, and the spear they gripped, were pushed into her, hard, and her head whiplashed forward, forehead striking the ancient wood with enough force to raise a good-sized knot there. She kept her feet, stumbling backwards nearly a dozen paces before finding her balance once again.

And finding the firedrill on the ground right beside her.

_Yep, I planned it that way; absolutely._

Accident or not, she took what breaks came her way, grabbing up the bow-shaped device in one hand while keeping the spear aimed towards the monster with the other.

"Okay, work. Work!" She held the object up like the old woman had in her dream, willing with all her might for it to erupt into flame. "C'mon! Burn that thing!" Once again, nothing happened. Blood trickled down one side of her face; when the spear had hit her head it must have split the skin there. Certainly the pounding knot gave adequate testimony of the blow she'd taken.

_Too bad it didn't knock some inspiration into me along the way,_ She thought bitterly. The blood streaming down her cheek felt like tears; she was angry enough, and frustrated enough to know how good it would feel to just break down right now and scream and cry and demand some kind of answer from whatever 'higher power' had set up this little 'test'.

_There's just nothin' I can do. The Indians used magic to beat this thing the first time, but even with their artifacts I don't have any magic. I'm a Slayer, all I have is my body; blood, and bone, and some stronger-than-human muscles. Against some things that's enough, but against this.... _

The Beast was coming for her again, and as the blood began to drip from her chin, she wondered if she had another bought of useless struggle left inside her. She wondered that, and as she did the quality of light around her began to change. Faith blinked, throwing a glance at the bonfire. It still burned, a little lower now than it had been when she'd first entered the clearing. Why, then, was it slightly_ brighter_ here than it had been a moment ago? She looked at the firedrill, then at the spear; neither of them looked any different. The she looked down.

The stone, the one hanging from a leather string around her neck, the one which had been so stubbornly dark when she had willed it to glow, was now emitting a faint flicker of gold light. The pale radiance faded, then grew, then faded, then grew... in time to the drops of blood falling upon it from Faith's chin.

_Blood and bone. Blood._

In her dream, she'd seen the dark Shaman use blood; he'd killed people to help create his SpiritBeast, he'd killed himself to free his creation at the end, in order to see his vengeance continue after he was gone.

Blood, and magic born from it. It was wrong, she'd felt the wrongness of it as she'd lived through his use of it. But....

_But it's the only thing that seems to be working for me, and...._

"And nobody beats me." She whispered to the Beast that was stalking slowly towards her. "Nobody."

She awkwardly took the firedrill in the same hand which held the spear, then tipped the weapon so that she could reach up and draw the sharp, metal-veined stone across her palm. A brief bite of pain there, and fresh blood began to flow down her wrist. She brought that hand to the stone hanging against her breasts, and smeared the warm liquid across it's smooth surface.

Instantly, light blazed forth, warm and golden despite the sticky red coating that now adorned the artifact. The SpiritBeast hesitated, a furious hiss splitting the night. Faith grinned with sudden triumph.

_Yeah, that's a step in the right direction!_

Hesitantly, unsure if this seeming reprieve would be snatched away from her by some unknown rule of magic of which she was totally unaware, she tucked the firedrill under her arm, and took hold of the spear haft with her bleeding hand. Nothing visible happened, but the weapon she held seemed suddenly heavier, more solid in her grip. The copper and flint of the blade gleamed in the light from the stone at her throat, and she felt some of her doubts fade.

_I'm okay, I'm going to do this. If this is a test, and I'm cheating or something by doing things this way, well, then, fuck 'em! No matter what happens to me, this thing needs to be destroyed. Not banished, not locked away; but completely fucking annihilated._

Quickly, without hesitation, she raised the hand which held the firedrill, and opened her fingers enough to slide the tip of the spearpoint across the flesh there. Before any of the crimson could spill out and be wasted, she gripped the artifact tightly. As she did so, blood-red flame burst into being all along the bow. Where it touched her flesh, the fire did not burn; it tingled across her skin with a decidedly odd sensation, but it did not harm her.

_Of course it's not hurting me; this is_ my_ power, _my_ magic. _It was plain to her now; she was no Shaman, no Sorceress. She had no training in how to manipulate or channel magical energies, and it might not have done her any good if she did. She was a Slayer; a human being who had been filled to overflowing with magic in its purest form. In a sense, she_ was_ magic; every particle of her resonated with it, it was intertwined with her very life... and blood was the essence of life. With her blood she had finally achieved a link with the artifacts, her power had reached them, and they were functioning as they were meant to; reflecting that power, amplifying it, shaping it to her purpose.

Perhaps sensing that the balance in their battle was shifting, the Beast opened its jaws and _breathed._

Darkness billowed forth, but Faith made no attempt to dodge. Instead, she focused her will within the stone. The golden light shining from it instantly grew blinding-bright, etching every detail of the clearing in stark relief-and eating deeply into the blackness that engulfed her. The magical attack was not completely negated; she felt doubt and fear scratching with sharp little kitten-claws at her already tattered and weary soul, but she was able to endure it. Seeing this, the SpiritBeast lowered its head and hissed again, warily this time. Faith let the light fade back to a lower level, and would have chuckled at its consternation... if she could have managed to draw enough breath to utter it.

_Ahh; that poison's still there. I need to--_

No time; the hulking form scuttled forward with that unnerving, sinuous way it had, looking like it intended to roll right over top of her. She hopped to her right with what grace she had left -not much, given how she nearly tripped over her own feet in the process-and swung the spear in a broad slashing arc. The blade struck the thing in the side of its head, biting into one of the smaller scales along the massive jaw and drawing a tiny trickle of blood-promising, but still just a sting to something as large and powerful as this. The Beast roared its fury, whipping its head towards her and lashing out with one huge, taloned foot. The spear was still far out to her side, too far to bring back into line quickly with just one hand; but Faith's other hand held something too. As the huge claw came down at her, she swung the blazing firedrill across like it was the racquet in a tennis forehand. Where the two intersected there was an explosion of incandescent flame, and the Slayer was hurled backwards to sprawl heavily in front of the white hart's lifeless body. She lay there for an endless few moments, unable to move, unable to breathe at all anymore, seeing nothing but soft white fur splashed with crimson. Somewhere behind her, the SpiritBeast unleashed a deafening bellow, sounding more enraged than agonized. Despite the weakness that was overtaking her swiftly now, Faith managed to roll over. Through the spill of tangled brown hair that partially obscured her vision, she saw the dragon-like form standing in the center of the clearing. The massive clawed foot she had struck still smoldered faintly, but otherwise looked to be completely unharmed. As she watched, the Beast used that foot to claw at the ground, gouging deep furrows in the ground there. With every strike of those talons into the ground, Faith felt the earth shudder. Beyond the creature, at the edge of the fire's light, showers of brown leaves were fluttering downwards; the trees there were already dying.

_It's still not enough. The spear isn't sharp enough, the light isn't bright enough, the fire isn't hot enough.... Or maybe I'm just not strong enough._ Her entire chest was numb, and yet at the same time it felt tight, like steel bands were slowly crushing her. No breath would come; she couldn't even feel her heart beating anymore. Her eyes flickered to the artifacts she held, and she bit her lip against the despair that threatened to overcome her. _These things magnify what's inside of me, but I'm just one girl, Slayer or no. Even that older-than-dust Shaman and his friends couldn't beat this thing, not really. They settled on banishing it, but they couldn't hurt it. Why should I be able to do any better?_

Of course the answer was 'Because it's me; Faith, that's why', but whatever she might secretly hope, it looked like she wasn't special enough after all; not when it counted. Across the way, the Beast was staring at her with that eyeless gaze, and after a few seconds of watching, it slithered into motion, approaching for what she knew would be the last time.

Even then, on the brink of death and with no hope of winning, Faith ignored her body's desperate plea to simply lie there and let go. She stood; slowly, painfully, using the spear as support when her legs proved too weak to hold her by themselves. She stood there and faced her end, without blinking.

She couldn't have done anything else; that was the kind of person she was.

_Light. Light, fire, blade, not worth spit against that big black thug of a demon._ Her thoughts were wandering, weaving through the buzzing that was growing in her ears as the lack of breath joined with the poison in her veins, a team up that might just kill her before she got eaten... or whatever the Beast planned on doing with her.

_Stone at my throat, spear in my left hand, fire in my right. Maybe if I'd had two more hands, I could have played the drum and waved the pouch, all at the same time; would that have worked? _

Thirty feet between her and the creature now.

Then twenty-five, and the bonfire seemed even dimmer than it had been; or maybe that was just her.

_I should drop the firedrill, use both hands on the spear and drive the damned thing into the damned Thing. Or the firedrill; use that and throw away the spear, burn it alive; anything'll be better than just standing here._

Twenty feet now; it was moving cautiously, not knowing that she didn't have anything left.

_Nothing left inside, nothing much inside to begin with, was there?_ She waved the firedrill, the flames that ran along it now faded to a few blood-red flickers. _Artifacts, tools to magnify what's in me. Magnify nothing much, and you don't get much, do you? Magnify, magnify...._

Fifteen feet, and it paused once more, nostrils flaring as it took in her scent. Its head raised slightly, and she could almost feel its growing confidence that she was through fighting.

_Magnify me, one times one times one is...one, right?_ It had been awhile since she was in math class, but she seemed to recall that one clearly enough. Spear times Faith, Stone times Faith, Firedrill times Faith... not enough to do the job. Her vision blurred, bringing the images of the spear and the firedrill she still held together into one strange object. She frowned, forgetting for a moment to watch the creature; the vast black shadow that was again moving towards her lost for the moment in the importance of what she was considering.

_Spear, stone, firedrill, each one magnifying me, but only once for each. But there's three of them._

She could feel them; through the link forged by her blood, she could feel each artifact, pulsing gently like a living thing, joined to her, waiting for her to use them.

_'Cept I already used them, used them like they're 'sposed to be used... more or less. But that ain't working, so maybe...._ She was so tired; it was hard to even refocus her eyes and look at the SpiritBeast... look _up_ at the SpiritBeast. It loomed over her, looking down with an undeniable air of triumph. Slowly, so slowly, it's jaws opened, and it bent down towards her.

_--So maybe I should stop using them like they're meant to be, and start using them like I need them to be._

Faith laid the firedrill across her chest, touching the glowing stone. She took the spear up, swaying as she lost its support, and laid it crossways upon the firedrill, also touching the stone. Deep within her, where she felt each artifact's link with her own essence, she grabbed hold of those energies, those three distinctive things, and with an instinctive, intuitive, pure act of will, she brought them together.

Fire and light exploded from her body, hurling the Beast back with a squall of outrage. It crashed down with an impact which shook another flurry of leaves from the trees, then surged to its feet in an awkward-looking scramble. Shock radiated from it in near-palpable waves, but that was nothing to what Faith herself was feeling.

_Yeeeaaaggghhhh!?_ She fell to her knees, clutching the artifact in both hands. _Artifact? What--?_

Where there had been three objects, now there was only one; a long spear, its shaft seemingly made of two distinct pieces of wood, one thick and one slender, that had somehow been intertwined in a nearly seamless spiral. Golden flames danced along the wood without consuming it, and a hotter, purer shade of gold shone from the small crystalline bits of stone that were inlayed in both the wood and the metallic stone spearblade. A chill went through her, the numbness conquering her at last, and her head sagged forwards. As she faded, she cradled the spear close to her like an infant, and reached out, blindly.

There was so little life left inside her; just a tiny, fading spark... but that was enough. The thing in her hands was made to take hold of energies, even life energies, and magnify them; so that's what she told it to do.

Warmth spilled into her chest, wakening the numb flesh, easing the steel bands that had been crushing the life from her. As her life-force strengthened, that strength flowed out, into the spear where it was amplified many times over and cycled back into her weary body, the process feeding on itself, growing in moments to a torrent of flame that pushed her head up and drove her to her feet in a rush.

_Yes! Oh YES! _

The fire burned through her every vein, through every fiber of her body and being; finding the venom that had been killing her, and searing it into nothingness. Faith took a long, deep breath, feeling her heart pounding inside her chest once again, fierce and strong. She tightened her grip on the spear she held, holding it up for a closer look.

_Wow; one for the price of three, usually not a great bargain, but I'll take this one. _She could still feel the link to her essence, but now it came strangely enhanced. No longer three individual threads tied to her own Slayer energies, but three groups of three; spear-stone-firedrill, each one become both the others, as well as remaining itself. Faith's eyebrows scrunched together as she tried to figure out what was happening.

_Three of them, but now it's not just each one of them added to me. It's like.... It's like two mirrors, reflecting one another's reflection over and over again, except there's three of 'em. Not spear times Faith, Stone times Faith, Firedrill times Faith any more, but the three of them times the three of them times the three of them... times me. She grinned, showing the suddenly uncertain creature her own teeth for a change, and liking the feeling. How about twenty-seven times the Faith-Power, dude? Think you can handle that much of a good thing?_

The SpiritBeast roared its defiance, charging in a mass of black-armored muscle and glinting fangs that looked absolutely unstoppable.

Faith blurred aside at the last moment, a strike from the bright-shining spear shearing through the thick scales of its chest and drawing forth a heavy splash of dark blood. The thing howled in outrage, whirling with incredible speed and lashing out with one massively-taloned paw.

The Slayer struck even quicker, the blade of her weapon glowing with gold-white heat, slicing cleanly through scales and unnatural flesh and bone together, leaving the greater portion of that paw twitching uselessly in the dirt.

The creature shrieked, unaccustomed to that kind of pain, and hastily backed away. Faith stood, feet braced, watching. Confused now about what was happening, and perhaps feeling fear for the first time in its entire life, the SpiritBeast turned and fled, lurching away from her with considerable speed, given its missing appendage. The tall girl didn't chase after it; instead she raised the spear she held. The shaft, already flickering with magical flame, abruptly blazed hotly gold, as bright and searing as the inside of a blast furnace. The thick, oppressive feel of the clearing, the heavy residual energies of the bloody rituals it had taken to call the Beast back, suddenly changed. It was as if the air itself caught fire, a ring of light rushing outwards from the weapon Faith held aloft, washing over the open space like a wave, consuming the malignant forces that lingered there and leaving a faint glow in its wake. At the border between the clearing and the surrounding forest, the energy split, spilling downwards to the ground, and rising upwards for fifty feet or more, rippling for a moment before transforming into a solid wall of fire. The fleeing SpiritBeast stumbled to a halt just feet from the fiery barrier, its head whipping back and forth as it sought some open path, some means of escape.

"Hey, you." At the sound of Faith's voice, the creature slowly turned about, the ground smoking slightly where its thick blood dripped from the stump of its severed foot. The Slayer padded towards it, blazing spear still held high. It took concentration to maintain the wall, but the effort wasn't that difficult, especially with the incredible energy that was continually cycling between her and the artifact she held.

_Best damn high I've ever had._ She thought wryly, feeling somewhat giddy with the rush of power moving through her. _I feel great, but _this_ is going to feel even better._

"I didn't run away, you ball of spirit-snot; so you don't get to either." Stopping in the exact center of the clearing, she braced herself, the spear's point aimed exactly at the center of the thing's head. "Now, why don't you come on over here and give me a goodbye kiss?" It stood motionless, staring at her with that blank excuse for a face, and she raised her chin and pursed her lips suggestively, as if offering that kiss in truth.

And the SpiritBeast came for her.

It came slowly at first, then faster and faster, driving towards her like it had forgotten that one brief moment of fear and knew only that she was but a single mortal girl, and it was a fusion of death, and poison, and uncaring, unrelenting hate, all given monstrous, indestructible form. It came for her, and Faith drove forward to meet it. As she went she dropped the barrier of flame around the clearing; it was no longer necessary, and she needed all of her power for what was to come. She and the Beast met, and at the last possible moment she moved; moved, faster than she'd ever done in her life. She ducked low, lunging beneath the thing's gaping mouth and thrusting the spear home through that long, thickly-muscled neck. The scales there were no defense; Faith had brought every bit of energy at her command into the blade of her weapon, and it hissed as it drove home, literally vaporizing the gleaming obsidian plates that barred its way into the creature's flesh. Her momentum, and that of the huge Beast, drove her into its chest, her shoulder slamming into the armor there with bone-wrenching force. Despite that she managed to hang on to the spear, and a moment later came the scream.

Deafening, endless, so piercing that it would have shattered glass for miles around... had there been any glass for miles around. As it was Faith was nearly sent reeling, and only stayed standing because of her grip upon the shaft of her weapon. Her weight upon it caused the blade to grind about inside the creature, and that ignited a frenzy of struggle from the thing. It thrashed around, struggling to free itself from the weapon that had impaled it, and likewise struggling to reach the girl who had wounded it so grievously.

Faith held on for dear life, using all the strength in both legs to fend off a vicious swipe of the creature's remaining forefoot. At the same time, she reached inside herself once more, focusing her energies within the spear, and then loosing them.

All her power, all of her many-times amplified force exploded from the artifact as searing magical flame... and this time that flame struck the Beast from within.

There was no scream now, no shriek or bellow or howl. There was only a spasm that shook the creature, a series of shudders that traveled through its entire multi-ton mass, and then it stood there, still as a statue.

Faith stepped back a pace, took a grip on the very end of the spear, and hurled herself upwards. Hooking one leg across the thing's broad shoulders, she blew out her breath and _pulled._ Slowly, the shaft of the spear acting as a lever, she twisted the creature's neck until its head was nearly upside down. The tendons in the Beast's neck stood out like cables, and Faith could feel the spear lock in place as the massive vertebrae in that neck reached their point of maximum rotation. Standing atop the motionless creature, panting with the effort it took to hold that great weight of muscle in such an unnatural position, the Slayer carefully shifted her grip on the weapon's shaft, gauged the distance to the ground on the opposite side from where she'd started, and let herself fall. Her toes found purchase in the tiny chinks between scales, and she straightened her legs violently, straining with every muscle in her body to add to the force of her body's weight.

With a heavy, muffled -Crack-the Beast's neck snapped, and even as Faith struck the ground the creature's body collapsed like a puppet whose strings had finally been cut. It was tempting to just lie there for a minute, resting, but even this wasn't enough.

She wanted to be _sure._

Bringing herself to her knees, Faith took hold of the spear once again. The blade portion was still buried deep inside the now brutally twisted neck, and she left it there as she once again gathered within the weapon all of the energies she could take hold of. For long moments she let the power build; soon she was gritting her teeth against the pain the forces caused her as they washed into her, then back into the spear, then back again, growing stronger with each passage through the energy-magnifying artifact. She endured the pain as she'd endured it before; maybe that was what everything in her short life had been preparing her for, maybe it hadn't been wasted after all.

As it built to the limit of what she could withstand, she leaned close to that hideous, eyeless face. It had seemed so frightening before; now, twisted around to upside down plus a little, it looked almost comical.

"It's been fun, Blackie; don't think it hasn't been." She found that for some reason a hoarse whisper was the best she could manage. Maybe she really should think twice about the cigarette thing. That, plus maybe the whole thing of still being alive, brought a smile. "Been fun, but I'm a Vampire Slayer. I kill something, I want to see a little dust, y'know?" The power was as much as she could bear now; maybe a little bit more. She let it build for another few seconds anyway, tears starting down her face as her flesh began to take on a faint, golden glow. "Show me some dust, you motherfucker."

She released the energy, and it grounded into the huge corpse before her. An enormous -Thump--, a concussion that raised foot-high waves up and down the entire miles-long lake at her side, and the SpiritBeast exploded into very black, extremely-fine power. And, as she knelt there and watched, it ever-so-slowly began to blow away.

She'd won; Faith had slain her dragon.

Even with that, though, her task wasn't quite done. For one thing, the ground beneath her was still poisoned. She was too tired to even identify what sense she was using, Slayer-enhanced nose or something more mystical, but whichever it was, the earth here reeked of the creature's taint. Still acting more or less on instinct, she dragged the spear towards her. Still kneeling, she'd just set the metal-veined stone of the weapon's tip in the dirt before her when a strange crackling sound registered. She looked around, wondering vaguely what could be making that sound, like ice crackling during a spring thaw. The low-burning bonfire was nearly silent, and nothing else around her moved. Finally, she turned her eyes on the spear itself.

It still glowed, sullenly, like the fire, but not in the same way it had before. Now, the light shone out through the myriad of tiny cracks which seemed to thread through every inch of the weapon. She immediately gripped it tighter, as if to hold it in one piece, but a quick look at it through the link she shared with the artifact showed that the situation was hopeless.

_I musta broke it when I dusted ol' Blackie over there._ She thought sadly. _Or maybe just forcing the three things into one started some kind of chain-reaction deal; either way, as soon as I let go of it, it's toast._

Powdered toast.

Leaving that aside for the moment, she turned back to what needed doing. Carefully -more carefully, now, since she knew the magical tool was fragile, and growing more so by the moment--, Faith channeled a steady flow of power through the spear and into the earth beneath her. As she had seared the mystical poison from her own veins, so did she now burn it from the living soil. Already the contagion had spread father than she would have thought possible; nearly five-hundred feet in every direction; a bit farther that that towards the wellspring of evil energies that was Sunnydale. The poison was vile, and strong, but without its source it was no match for the gold fire she pitted against it. She thought that the process took a long time, but there was no way to measure passing minutes here, and her Slayer sense of sunrise seemed to have temporarily deserted her.

When she was finished with that, she took a precious few moments to catch her breath, and then she climbed to her feet. Once she got up there, she was a bit surprised by how difficult it was to stay upright.

_Man, I'm tired. Gotta be tired, I'm not hurt bad enough to explain feeling this slagged. _Indeed, other than the self-inflicted cuts on her palms, all she had to show for the battle was a bump on the head, a deep slice across her forearm, and some clawed and bruised ribs. _Hm. Okay, some pretty decent damage, I guess, but I've got one more thing to do._

There; it still lay there, a still white shape shining softly beside the low embers of the bonfire. Faith walked forward, spear in hand, then bent to lay her palm upon the hart. Even now, the soft fur was warm; probably because it lay so close to the fire. Awkwardly, holding the spear in her left hand to try and spare those sore ribs, she slid her right arm beneath the body. It was a struggle to lift it, especially one-handed. She was plenty strong enough, normally, but right now she wasn't at her best, and the thing _did_ mass many times her own body weight. Nevertheless, she did manage it, and with the dead beast perched precariously on her shoulder, its legs dangling around her and the head with those huge, dangerous antlers hanging against her back, she slowly turned and began walking along the shore of the lake.

At first she didn't know where she was going, she just knew it needed to be somewhere away from that clearing. Despite all she'd done to cleanse it, there still remained something of the creature and its evil there. What she bore on her shoulder deserved better, it deserved a cleaner place than that, and a few hundred yards further down the shore, she found it.

A low promontory lay just above the lake's edge, a rocky outthrust of land maybe twenty feet higher than the shoreline. As she climbed the steep incline, she saw that there was a single large tree there, on the last bit of flat ground before it dropped away into the water. The tree was long dead; leafless and gray, with a brittle look about it. Despite that it wasn't decayed at all as far as she could see, just surrounded with a thin scattering of fallen branches. Still balancing the stag on her shoulder, Faith carefully walked forward, her feet crunching the brittle twigs underfoot. She raised the spear, noting that the multitude of fine, glowing cracks there seemed a bit wider.

"Sorry about this," She muttered to the tree. Sure, it_ looked_ like just a hunk of dead wood, but this little adventure had shown her that there was more to stuff like this than met the eye; at least in places like this one. "I think you'd want this, though. It seems...." She glanced around uneasily, at the utterly silent forest, the quietly rippling water, and the starlit sky, then shrugged. "It seems like the right thing to do."

With a tiny fraction of the power she'd unleashed earlier, Faith reached out and tapped the spear lightly against the tree's trunk. With a soft sigh, the entire thing collapsed straight down, crumbling into a mound of dry wood fragments that reached the middle of her thighs and was maybe ten feet across. Standing there in the stuff, Faith turned as best she could and eased the body off her shoulder, down into the pile in the approximate center of things. She then waded out, moving slowly and carefully so as not to disturb it too much.

Looking at what she'd done, she had a moment when she wondered what the hell she was doing.

_This is kinda outside my usual thing, isn't it? I wonder if all this stuff isn't messing with my head, a little._

Of course there was no way to answer that, and since she'd already come this far, there was no reason not to finish it. She extended the tip of the spear, again channeling just the smallest bit of power. Instantly the mound of pulverized wood burst into flame, the orange light shining back from the water below. At the same time, the spear in her hands let out a series of pops and cracks, and began disintegrating in her hands.

With a sigh, Faith tossed the artifact onto the pile next to the body of the white deer, then turned away.

For an hour or so she sat there, watching the fire burn. Twenty yards had been as far as she felt like walking, so she'd found a convenient tuft of soft grass and made herself comfortable. If someone had come to investigate the fire, she'd have told them that she was cooking an early breakfast and asked them for some marshmallows, but nobody came.

_Those folks at the lodge up the lake probably heard all the roaring and screaming, and figured that there's a bear out here... or a whole family of 'em. I doubt they'll be outside much today, unless they have some decent firepower to bring along._

Which they probably did, actually. A good reason for her to get gone, if only that old Indian would show up and give her her diploma, or medal, or whatever the hell she'd earned by doing all of this.

Or maybe he'd just leave her here. She had managed to lose or destroy all five of those artifacts, after all. He probably wouldn't appreciate that, at all.

Musing on that, she barely noticed the lightening sky across the lake; clouds glowing softly pink against deep blue as the stars went away, first one by one, then by dozens and by scores. She just sat there, nearly dozing, so tired that her eyelids seemed to weigh like anvils... until a stirring came from the pyre she'd built.

The flames were low, just intermittent flickers from a low, broad mound of ashes, barely visible in the growing light, but as the first bright bit of the sun showed above the mountains to the east, the soft gray blanket heaved. As Faith sat in stunned disbelief, a huge white stag erupted from the ashes. It stepped slowly forth from where it had emerged, seemingly unconcerned about the tongues of fire that licked around its legs. It stood there, facing the dawn, and shook itself thoroughly, unleashing a brief blizzard of ash. Then it turned, and stalked majestically past where Faith sat. As it passed, it turned its head briefly to consider her, and dipped those massive antlers in a regal gesture. Moving into the trees beyond, it was soon lost from view.

The Slayer stared after it for a long while, then turned to consider the remains of the fire.

"Helluva lot different than Boston, ain't it?" She said to the morning at large. No answer came back, and she let herself fall back into the soft grass. Within the space of a breath, she was asleep.

* * * * *


	7. Chapter 7

Here we go; last chapter of this one.

Thanks to everyone who has been reading along (and especially those who have commented).

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Sunlight.

Faith squinted against the brightness, realizing even as she did so that the glare wasn't as bad as it could have been, as it was being filtered through green leaves overhead. Only occasional shafts of undiluted light were striking her face, let through as the branches above her were jostled about by the cool, gentle breeze. With a groan she turned her head away, shifting her body slightly in an attempt to get comfortable once more. A sharp, clean smell filled her nose as she took a deep breath, and she froze.

_Where--?_

She lifted her head and looked around. She was curled up in a hollow beneath a broad-leafed tree, so the bed of soft pine needles underneath her had to have been put there by someone. For that matter, she herself had to have been put there by someone, because this definitely was not where she'd fallen asleep. She sat up, pushing the unruly brown tangles of hair back from her face.

_I feel better; better than I should, anyway._ She lifted her fingers to her face, probing the knot on her forehead, then felt for the slice her arm had taken; both injuries were all but healed. _Gee, that was fast. I woulda thought it would take a couple or three-_

Someone was coming. She stared out from the sun-dappled shade of her refuge, across the bright, grassy verge that separated the forest from the lake. A ways off to her right was the elevated promontory where she'd burned the deer, and it was from there that someone was approaching. It was a human figure, but for some reason her eyes weren't working quite right. The outline she saw was blurred, shifting and changing like she was looking through a veil of swirling water. She rubbed at the faint bump on her head again, and scrunched her eyes shut hard before opening them and giving the figure another look. This time they worked perfectly, and she saw who it was.

The old Indian, of course. He was a lot closer, now, and when she started to get up he waved her back.

"Hey, that's okay, stay there if you want." He strode into the shade, then stopped a few feet short of where she sat. "How are you, Slayer girl?"

She shrugged, and the motion turned into a joint-popping stretch and yawn. His eyebrows rose, and she gave him an apologetic smile.

"Sorry. Um," She looked down at herself. Her jacket had apparently been spread over her as a blanket, but she still wore the same pants and top that she'd had on the night before. She put a hand though the tear over her side, but the wound underneath the cloth was closed and at least half-healed. She tilted her head a bit to one side and considered him thoughtfully.

"I'm okay; pretty good, actually."

"Glad to hear it." He held her backpack in his hand, she noticed. He saw the direction of her gaze, and lay it down next to her. "I went back for this; I figured it was the least I could do."

She nodded. It would be nice to change into something a little cleaner; after her fight, not to mention all the hiking, what she had on was getting pretty grimy.

"Thanks." She fingered the nearly-invisible wound on her arm again. Other than a somewhat puffy red line, there was almost no sign that it had ever been hurt. "Did you do something to help me heal up, too. 'Cause it would usually take more than a few hours for something like this to go away."

He'd sat himself down on the ground beside her while he spoke, his feet tucked under him in, well, Indian fashion. Now he glanced at the spot on her arm she indicated, and shook his head.

"No, I didn't help you heal; you did that on your own." He gestured at where she sat, the Faith-shaped depression in the surprisingly comfortable bed of pine needles. "You've been sleeping there for more than a few hours. That's why you're nearly recovered from what you went through."

She blinked, still rubbing at the faint remains of the cut, which was itching a little.

"How long?"

He made a depreciating gesture with one hand.

"Today is the third since you destroyed the SpiritBeast."

Faith looked at him in shock. Not that she was totally freaked or anything; she'd suspected it might be something like that. Still, three days of laying here, with bears and cougars and god-knew what else walking by and sniffing at her while she was unconscious; unable to even defend herself if they decided to take a bite out of her….

There was also a more mundane question to that immediately occurred to her.

"How come my bladder didn't explode?" He grinned, and she scowled back at him. "No, really. I should be swelled up like a balloon or something. Hell, I should be starving, and dying for a drink of water; but I'm not. How come?"

The old man held up a hand and wiggled his fingers at her.

"Magic." He laughed at the wary expression she couldn't help but show. "Really; I've got some tricks that the best Las Vegas magician would kill to know, and of course the spirits of this place now consider themselves very much in your debt." He leaned forward a little, and his voice lowered. "Believe me; between them watching over you, and my protection, you were safer here than you've ever been in your life."

Faith nodded, but looked out over the lake.

"Well, that's not saying much." That came out surly, and he didn't deserve that from her. "But thanks. Thanks for watching out for me. I'm not real at home out here in the sticks, y'know?"

"I know. And you're welcome."

She sighed, noticing again that it was a really pretty day. The grass was green, the sky was blue, and the lake was a funny in-between color; not really either one, but with a bit of silvery-gray mixed in. It was nice here; clean and stuff, which wasn't something she would have thought before, when she thought about a nature spot like this.

"You said the spirits like me now?" She said, and he nodded.

"Very much. After all, you did save this entire area from utter destruction." He smiled then, scratching alongside his nose with one long finger. "They have long memories, too, so don't be surprised if they try and do you the occasional favor. Like that, for instance."

Faith twisted half-around, following his gaze. There, beside the tree trunk, was a smooth stone the size of her fist. Beneath it, pinned there against the errant breeze, was a good-sized stack of green bills. She reached out, carefully setting the stone aside and grabbing the cash before the wind could take it.

"Holy crap." She muttered, leafing through them. "There must be a thousand bucks here."

The old man nodded, looking a little embarrassed.

"Well, it seems that at least one of them saw what you did out by the highway; the pick-pocketing." She darted a glance at him, but he wasn't accusing her of anything, just stating a fact. "So for the last few days, anyone from the lodge over yonder who goes out hiking or hunting stands a better than average chance of 'accidentally' losing any cash he or she might be carrying." He looked at her, one eyebrow arched wryly. "Leave it to you to teach the little people bad habits."

Faith immediately raised her hands; one of them still clutching the loot.

"Hey! Don't blame me for what _they_ decided to go and-"

"Relax; I'm not blaming you." He jerked a thumb towards the far end of the lake. "Those types can afford to contribute to the cause. After all, you did save their playground, even if they'll never know. And you can buy yourself something nice when you get back; some new clothes, maybe."

She nodded, rolling the bills up and stuffing them into her backpack.

_You bet your ass I'll buy some stuff. Clothes, a new jacket; a boom box for my room at the hotel. _She frowned, suddenly struck by something. _I could get a real apartment; someplace nice…. Nah. That would use this up in just a couple of months, and Giles would want to know where I got the money. Better to use it a little at a time, to fill out what the Council's 'allowance' don't cover._

"Beauty. Could you, uh-" She waved at the scene in general. "-Could you tell 'em thanks?"

"There's no need; they know." The old man joined her in looking out over the lake. "You deserve more than just money, you know. What you did…." He shook his head slowly. "That was something beyond price. You've exceeded my wildest hopes."

Faith leaned back against the tree, too comfy to move just yet.

"Didn't think I could beat that thing, didja?"

He gave her a sidelong look, then shrugged.

"No, actually."

That was a little too honest for her; it touched off the bitter resentment that had been slowly growing in her for weeks.

"Then I guess you were really hoping for Buffy to show up here and fight your monster for you." She plucked a few pine needles from the bed of them she was sitting on and rolled them back and forth between her fingers. She focused on their texture, needing something, anything to distract her from how she was feeling.

The old Indian, however, was looking a little impatient with her.

"The other Slayer couldn't have beaten the SpiritBeast, Faith. At least, not in the way that you did."

She stared at him, wondering how she could feel so awful now, when just moments ago she'd been feeling fine, even… peaceful. It was so beautiful here, and she'd done a good thing for once, and still there was so much darkness in her. The slightest prodding brought it up to the surface, where it stood poised to overwhelm her once more.

"But she would have killed it, right? She could have taken it out the way you meant for it to be done, without destroyin' anything, or, or-" She had to stop; the words were getting tangled up in her throat as she recalled the utter desperation that had engulfed her during the battle. "I-" She swallowed, then tried again. "I don't see how you could have expected me to have a chance in hell against something like that. If I hadn't figured out how those things, those artifacts worked, how to link them together-"

"That's exactly the point, Faith." He interrupted her. Neither one of them was looking out at the pretty lake now. They were staring at each other; her with a bitter fury that had now totally replaced the tranquility she'd woken up with, and he with a strange mix of earnestness and… satisfaction?

"There was a chance, and granted, it was a slim one, that you could defeat that creature." He wasn't making apologies, and she had to admit that he'd told her before the fight that it would be rough. "If you could have prevented it from killing any of those people in the first minutes, it wouldn't have been able to sustain itself in this world. If you had destroyed all of the artifacts at the same time --by throwing them into the bonfire, for example-- then the backwash of mystical power might well have swept the Beast back into its prison, at least for a time."

She was a bit stunned, wondering why neither of those ideas had occurred to her at the time.

_Maybe because I was too busy trying not to get fucking_ killed_ by the damned thing!_

"Either of those probably would have worked, and there are a couple more options that were at least possible. Perhaps your sister Slayer would have used one of them to banish the creature once more; we'll never know that now. But-" He reached out and poked her in the thigh with a finger to get her full attention. "-But; there was absolutely no chance at all that either she or you could out and out _kill_ that entity." He sat back and regarded her from an expressionless face. "None at all."

Faith wasn't sure now if she were mad or not.

"But I did kill it."

He nodded, and there was no doubt now about the satisfaction he was emanating.

"Yes, you did."

She frowned, trying to figure out where this was supposed to be leading.

"Well, then I guess it wasn't impossible after all, was it?"

"Wrong." He watched her blink, then went on. "Let me explain a couple of things to you. Number one; while you would have been able to destroy those artifacts, at least at that time, and in that place, there was no way you could have made use of them. They were made by the People, for use by the People." He gestured at her face, and she was reminded that her European features were anything but Indian. "You could have used the spear as a spear, but you could never have awakened the power within any of those objects."

"But I did!" Faith protested. She had been there, she certainly knew what she'd done.

Rather than argue with her, he only nodded.

"But you did. Leaving that aside for the moment, there is the fact that no individual, no matter how powerful their magic, can use more than one of the artifacts at the same time."

"But I-"

"Yes, I know." He gave her a penetrating look. "Hush now; I'm not trying to piss you off, I'm trying to tell you something important." She settled back, closing her mouth reluctantly, and he nodded. "Good. Now, there's just couple more impossible things that you managed to do." He started ticking them off on the fingers of one hand. "Wielding the tools without the proper blood in your veins; that's one. Using three tools at once; that's two. Linking the power of three into one, thereby vastly amplifying the energy at your disposal; impossibility number three."

Faith shifted uncomfortably at that.

"Uh, listen. I didn't know I was going to break your ancient relics or anything when I did that-"

He brushed that aside.

"Not important, I forgive you, and I said 'Hush'." Faith briefly debated the pros and cons of getting up and kicking his ass, but he'd already rolled onwards. "Lastly; you should not have been able to use blood magic against that being. If anything, such power should have made it stronger, but instead you succeeded in destroying the Beast utterly."

He looked at her, and she wondered what she was supposed to say. 'Sorry, I should have just lay down and died instead of fighting'?

"Did I break some kind of rule or something?" She asked instead. "You never said anything about there being rules."

He looked grimmer than before, if that was possible.

"There are always rules, and yes; you broke several of them." She was just starting to get worried when his face broke into a wide grin. "Don't you remember what I told you when we first met? I_ like_ to break the rules. That's what they're there for, after all."

Faith smiled in relief.

"Oh. Well, cool." And it was, too. Except… if what he said was true, then what did it mean?

"If all that stuff I did was so impossible," She began, "And I know I'm not any kind of Shaman, or Sorcerer who can do heavy magic, then how come I was able to do it?"

He scratched at his chin, considering.

"You were able to do those things because it's in you to be able to do them; it's in your nature. And," A sidelong look at her with those black, fathomless eyes. "-No matter what her power and skill as a Slayer, this is something that your bright sister would never be able to accomplish; no more than she could manage to fly by flapping her arms. It simply isn't in her."

Faith stared down at her bare feet, digesting that.

_I can do something Buffy can't do. I don't know how I did it, but there it is._

Of course, that got her wondering about just what all of this was about, and why the old man was so interested in her.

He must have seen her suspicions in her look.

"Do you recall, that night by the pool, when you asked me what my purpose was in being there? I told you that I would tell you later. Well," He glanced up at the sun, marking its position. "Later is now."

She crossed her legs at the ankle and folded her hands across her tummy, staring at him expectantly.

"Okay then; lay it all out for me."

He seemed amused by her attitude.

"All right, I'll try. Though you likely won't grasp the truth of what I'm saying for quite some time." He paused, gathering his thoughts. "Okay; try this. Change; it's a universal constant. 'The only thing that stays the same is change'; ever hear that one?" She nodded, still waiting for him to dazzle her. "Well, sometimes change comes slow, and sometimes it comes as a wave that up and washes away everything in its path. Take the People, for example." He looked out at the lake, and at the mountains which surrounded it. "They were here… for a long time. Nice folks, mostly; I liked 'em." He looked back to her, and she saw that his eyes had gone all black again. "Then, almost before anyone knew it was happening, they were gone. Killed off, or driven off to some lousy bit of land and fenced in, so's they can just sit there and rot. I don't think they'll ever heal from that."

Faith chewed at her lip for a moment before speaking up.

"That didn't happen overnight. It took, like, a couple hundred years for the Indians to be screwed over."

He just looked at her.

"Like I said; an eye blink. They were set in their ways, I suppose; too slow to adapt to what was happening." He stared off into space for a moment more, then brought that disturbing gaze back to her. "I'm an advocate of change, Faith; I promote it, I think it's necessary. But I don't like it when change leads to needless suffering. And there are ways to help keep that from happening."

She was starting to get an uneasy feeling, kind of like the one she'd gotten when Ms. Northam has walked up to her that very first day, and started talking about vampires.

"What ways?" She asked cautiously.

He looked at her, seeming to gauge her somehow.

"Do the words 'Nexus' or 'Avatar' mean anything to you?"

Faith thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. If Buffy thought that she was the least-educated Slayer in history, well, she hadn't been around when the Boston-born girl had been introduced to the books. It had been hate at first sight, actually.

"No idea." She said, and left it at that.

He shrugged.

"That's all right, neither one really gets the idea across very well. What you are, or at least have the potential to become, is…." He stared at her obviously struggling with something.

"Yeah, I can become…?" She prompted.

He scowled, one hand making an impatient gesture.

"Crap, this language just doesn't work for explaining, not when I'm already simplifying to the point where the explanation is all but meaningless."

Now she was feeling a little cheated. She'd gone through this shit for a reason, and it was time she knew what it was.

"C'mon, don't you dare wimp out on me now! You said you were going to tell-"

"There might not_ be_ a way, Faith." He ran his hand across the grass before him, watching as the green stalks sprang back upright in the wake of its passage. "You want words? Very well. You will be a living weapon, something so deadly that anyone near you will be able to hear the Reaper whispering in their ear. You will be a rudder, the only hope for a foundering ship the size of a world. You will be a light that is cursed as darkness, and a darkness that is worshipped as the light. Warmth in the freezing cold, a blaze that consumes what many hold dear." He took in her confused gaze and shrugged. "I told you. Want me to keep going?"

She shook her head, a little dazed at what he'd said. If any of that was true… well, she didn't know what it meant, but not all of it sounded good.

"No, that's enough, thanks."

He nodded.

"Yeah. I think we're better off skipping this part for now."

They sat there in silence for a few minutes, and Faith tried hard not to get too crazy about what he'd told her.

_I did something that was impossible, something nobody should have been able to do, and that means… what? That I'm going to do something else? Something that's part 'darkness' and part 'light'? What the hell am I supposed to think about that?_ She breathed deeply of the cool, clean air, and watched a hawk circling high above the trees across the way. _I could tell Giles about all this, maybe he could explain it to me. _Almost before she'd thought it Faith dismissed that option. _No. No way am I going to run to him and be the nice little Slayer, not when he's been such a total prick to me, almost since day one. And that means no telling Buffy or anybody else there about this, either. They'd tell him, and he'd tell the Council. I already know that they don't trust me; they don't believe in me. If they found out that there's something weird going on, they might drag me to England and strap me to a table; do some magic experiments on me and see what makes me tick._

No thanks. I think I'll keep all of this stuff to myself. If it's even real; all I have is this guy's word on it, and who knows what he really is.

"That's probably for the best." The old man said quietly. Faith felt her lips pull back from her teeth in a snarl; she was sick and tired of this smart-ass doing that little mind reading trick!

"Listen; I've done what you wanted, I ran through the woods barefoot, I saw the visions, I fought the fucking unkillable Beast… and now I want you to_ stop-_"

"Want to know what your Totem is?" He inserted smoothly. She froze for a second or two, the closed her mouth and cleared her throat.

"I've got one? I mean, I passed the test, or quest, or whatever?"

He nodded solemnly.

"Yes, you passed. It's not really a pass or fail kind of thing, you know, but there's no doubt at all about this one. I was watching you while you did all those things you spoke of, and your totem showed through very clearly."

Faith sat upright, intensely curious about what her spirit animal might be.

"Is it something cool, like an eagle or a wolf?" He shook his head, and she felt a twinge of worry. "God, don't tell me it's something stupid, like a dog. Or a duck; it's a duck, isn't it?"

His lips twitched, and he shook his head again.

"Not a duck, though I have to admit that's an image I find strangely appealing."

She was getting seriously annoyed with him, and she made sure he saw it in her eyes.

"Well, quit screwing around and tell me."

He hesitated, drawing it out for a few more seconds, but when she reached for her backpack (whether to get up and leave or just club him with, she wasn't quite sure which) he finally relented.

"Most of the time, someone's totem does take the form of an animal; animals are the easiest thing for us to relate to. They have qualities and attributes that we can understand; personalities that mean something to us." He eyed her closely, a peculiar gleam in those black orbs he used to see with. "But some people, a very few people, don't associate with any of the animal totems. Instead, their essence matches most closely with something even deeper, more primal. The sun, for example, or the moon; both are things that are older than life on this world, and they have even deeper meanings within the human psyche than the animals man knows."

Faith nodded; that made sense to her.

_Buffy; even I know that Buffy is the Sun. Anybody could see that about her._

"So, what am I?"

Instead of answering immediately, he held out his hand to her. Unsure of what he wanted, she hesitantly held out her own; her left one. He took it, closing his larger hand about her own.

"You, you magnificent child, are something I am very glad I found. Forget about what I told you earlier; don't let it trouble you. All you need know is that you are special; above and beyond being called as a Slayer, though never doubt that there was a reason for that as well." His hand shifted slightly around hers, as if he were looking for just the right grip. She waited, still wondering if he were going to surprise her and rip it off at the wrist. "You are someone who can shatter rules which have held since the beginning, and never know or care. You are transformation and transfiguration, destruction and creation bound up together." He squeezed her hand now, applying pressure with gentle, firm strength, and she felt a brief shock run through the very bones there. "You want to know your totem? You wish to know what aspect of the universe mirrors the innermost truth of your soul?"

She nodded minutely. Any answers, any certainty about her place in things would be welcome indeed.

The old man smiled.

"Very well. You, Faith, are Fire."

Something in her changed, then. Oh, it wasn't a recreation of everything she was, she didn't suddenly become another person or anything. It was just… he was right, and some part of her recognized that fact. That was all.

Even if the rest of her was still a little confused about the whole thing.

"Fire? I'm Fire?" She asked. He nodded gravely, releasing her hand. She took it back, laying it in her lap as she mulled things over for a minute. "Um. You sure about that?"

He smiled faintly.

"I'm sure. If you could only see yourself when you're fighting; the way battle kindles something inside of you. Or the way you burn so brightly all the time, blazing with either fury or passion, and yet never realizing it, or knowing how others feel it affect them."

She didn't know about any of that, but still….

"Fire destroys stuff; it can hurt people. That's not… good, is it?"

He nodded, his mobile face shifting into sympathetic lines.

"True, it does destroy, if handled carelessly. Of all the elements, Fire can be the hardest to coexist with. That doesn't make it evil." He raised his hand, one finger pointing. "Look, there." Across the lake, two or three miles distant, she saw the thickly-forested mountain that rose to the east of where they sat. As she watched, a flicker of lightning leapt between the high forest there and the base of a looming thunderhead. At first nothing else happened except for the low roll of thunder that reached their ears many seconds later. Then, her far-seeing eyes caught sight of a faint wisp of smoke.

In the distance, the forest was burning.

"Fire." He turned again to face her. "It will burn for a few hours, before the rainfall and the terrain bring it to an end, but what it burns won't be destroyed; it will be renewed, transformed."

Faith was still looking up the mountain.

"I always thought burning stuff just meant it was gone."

He sighed at that.

"For some things yes; it does mean that. But out here, fire has a place; a purpose. It's a part of the natural order; something to be wary of, respectful of, but not something to be feared without reason."

"Oh." Well, she could live with that.

_Fire; that's me. Wicked. _

Now all she was left wondering was….

"What now?" She looked at him, waiting for him to finish spelling it out for her.

Instead, he was playing dumb.

"What do you mean?"

She shrugged, looking down at the scuffed and battered leather of her pants.

_Definitely buying a new pair when I get back. Maybe two._

"I mean, what do you want from me now?" She clarified. "You told me what I am, how glad you are that I turned up on your doorstep, you spooked me with that riff about what I'll become someday… so now what? Do I work for you or something? Got something you need 'firegirl' to burn for you?" She held up her left hand, showing him the rings there. "This bird one; that's yours, right? Some kinda mark of ownership, so everybody'll know who I belong to?" The 'bird one', the one with the tiny image that shifted as the ring turned, it was still there, still the same as the last time she'd looked, but the other one….

The other ring, which had been a plain copper band, was now decorated with a delicate tracery of flames. She paused, staring at the exquisite workmanship, turning the circle around and around on her finger, watching as the outlines etched into the metal seemed to shift and flow like real, living tongues of fire. She could almost feel the gentle heat coming off of it, a reassuring warmth on a hand that had been uncomfortably cold without her even realizing it….

"To hell with this; to hell with you."

She started to pull the rings off, but he reached out and put his hands on hers, preventing her.

"Ho there, wait just a second." Faith stopped, but she also used her fiercest glare to pin him in place. He grimaced, but didn't pull away. "Yes, that 'bird' is mine. But you're wrong if you think I'm trying to own you." He looked a bit reluctant to go farther than that, but under her unrelenting glare he finally did. "It is a sort of claiming, though. Not," He hastened to add. "I repeat; not as my property, more as… a mark of protection. This is a way of showing certain other… entities, that I'm keeping an eye on you, and that they'd better not try anything cute with you."

Faith sat back from him, still fiddling with the ring but no longer in a hurry to remove it.

"'Cute' like what?"

He gave her a bleak look.

"Let's just say that even though it's not permitted for the 'Powers that Be' to directly interfere in mortal affairs, they have been know to 'remove' certain individuals if they consider it justified. And if they think they can get away with it." She considered that, but he wasn't done. "As for you working for me; that's not how it goes. I don't want to tell you what to do; I wouldn't know where to start. All I need from you is for you to do what you want, when you want. I know what you are now, and just by existing you serve my purposes… such as they are."

Faith watched him as he said that, and again thought that either he was completely sincere… or the best liar on the planet.

"Okay."

She reflected that whatever she was, Fire or something else, she would always be a sucker for an earnest face. And for someone who looked to be telling her something straight out.

She looked around once more, at the sunlit grass out beyond the shade where they sat, at the glittering surface of the lake and the green trees beyond it, and sighed.

_Guess I'm done here. Time to head back._

She dug into her pack and pulled out her shoes. Checking first to make sure nothing had crawled into them, she slipped them on to her feet. Across from her, the old man was watching her.

"Where you going now?" He asked, carefully.

Faith shrugged, not looking up from what she was doing.

"Where do you think? Back to Sunnyhell."

She glanced up at him, but he'd turned slightly, and seemed to be staring off at something along the lakeshore. Following his gaze, she couldn't see anything special over there.

"Why?" He sounded like he was only idly curious, but there was something…. "Why go back there? You don't like it much, that's obvious." Faith didn't answer; she was lacing up her shoes and devoting maybe a little more attention to the task than it really deserved. Despite her silence, he wouldn't let it alone. "You certainly know that there is more than one place for a Warr-" He made a funny noise, and she glanced up at him. Rubbing at his nose like he'd been about to sneeze and then found he hadn't had to after all, he started again. "More than one place for a Slayer to ply her trade. There are other battles that need fighting, and Sunnydale already has a champion."

Faith finished up the one shoe, then turned to the other.

"Yeah, I know. But…." She chewed at her lip for a few moments, fiddling with the laces, before looking over at him. "I have to go back. There's someone waiting for me there. Or maybe I'm waiting for her." Damn, but she'd never had so much trouble tying a shoe. It was like her brain wasn't connected to her fingers at all. Shaking her head in irritation, she started picking at the laces, trying to undo the knotted mess she'd managed to put them into.

"Are you sure she's worth it?" He asked, causing her to look up with a frown.

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

He didn't react to her angry tone, he just gazed at her with what looked like simple curiosity, but she knew better than to believe that. Whatever he was, it wasn't ever 'simple'.

"I'm just wondering if this girl feels something towards you; if she returns the feelings you obviously have for her."

She cocked her head, considering that. It seemed like a legitimate question… the trouble was, she didn't have a good answer for him.

"I'm not sure. Is that what you want to hear?" Her shoes were laced up now, so she leaned over and grabbed hold of her backpack, pulling it into her lap. "I don't know what to think about her; that's the problem." Flipping open the flap of the pack, she peered inside. A change of clothes was in there, and it would be nice, but first she'd have to get to some kind of civilization and get cleaned up. No way was she putting on her last clean things while she was still this filthy. "I mean, she doesn't even like me; not really. I annoy her, I annoy her friends, and she cares for them a helluva lot more than she does me, so whenever it comes down to choosing where she's going to spend her day, well…."

He was leaning forward a little, she saw from the corner of her eye, paying a lot more attention to the details of this crap than really seemed proper.

"Well?" He asked, still sounding only mildly interested, despite what his body language said. "Doesn't that tell you something?"

Faith shook her head in irritation, still poking around in the depths of the backpack for no real reason other than it gave her something to do besides look at him.

"No, it doesn't tell me anything. Because even with all of that, she still… she still cares about me. She treats me like shit sometimes, and I don't think she even knows it when she does, but I think she cares." She wasn't seeing the pack now, she wasn't seeing anything around her. "Not… not a lot, really. Not as much as I wish she did, but it's there." Faith blinked, bringing herself back to the here and now with difficulty. She raised her head, looking the old man in the eye almost defiantly. "She saved my life; she didn't like me being there, she didn't much like_ me,_ but she helped me fight the vampire that killed my friend. She didn't have to do that. Nobody would have known if she'd just walked away and let him finish smashing me into the floor. But she stayed. For me."

He looked profoundly uncomfortable all of a sudden, and for the life of her she couldn't figure out why. For that matter, she wasn't sure what he was trying to get at, but there did seem to be something….

"Faith, she did that because that's what she does, because that's what she is."

He sounded like he was trying to explain something to a small child, and this when _he_ was the one who just didn't get it.

"Don't you understand?" She asked. "She's the only one who's never asked me for anything, who's never used me to get something. The Watchers wanted something from me; hell, even you wanted something from me, isn't that right?" He didn't reply, but one wasn't necessary. "Well, Buffy hasn't. She could; her mom wants me to take over the Hellmouth duty while her little girl goes off and plays college girl. But B never asked me to do it." She took a deep breath, remembering the tension she'd felt, waiting for the older girl to bring it up. Now, though, she realized something. "And she never will. Never. That's not who she is."

He shook his head slightly.

"You can't be sure of that, Faith. Maybe she's just waiting until the time is right."

"No." She was sure, absolutely sure. "She's not going to try and trick me, don't you see? Buffy has never lied to me; ever. She's not going to start now."

There, right there, she saw something cross his face. Some weight, some pain seemed to tear at him, and even though he hid it quickly, Faith knew what she'd seen.

"What? What is it?"

He didn't answer her, and for the life of her she couldn't figure out what it could mean. Grabbing up her pack, she stood.

"All right then, if you're through talking I'll just head on back to the highway. See ya."

She strode out of the shade, into the bright morning sunlight. Turning in place, she shaded her eyes with one hand and scanned the terrain as it rose upwards towards the ridge. There might be a route back that wouldn't be quite as winding as the one she'd taken on the way in.

"Faith." She ignored him, using her more-than-human eyesight to examine a likely-looking dip in the hill off to her right. The old man growled something under his breath that she didn't quite catch, and stood up.

"Listen; I'm not trying to tell you what to do here, I'm just-" She turned her head towards him, one brow raised, and he broke off with a sigh of frustration. "I know you're not a big believer in fate, or foretelling, and you're right not to be." The Slayer swung her backpack idly from hand to hand as she tried to figure out where_ this_ topic had come from. He'd folded his arms across his chest and was now looking at the ground before him as he spoke. "Ninety-five percent of the time, anything a prophet tells you is utter bullshit. The only time 'visions of the future' are right even half the time is if the 'future' you're looking at is only a few hours way. The closer the better, too, because if you start looking very far 'ahead', then only the incredibly profound stuff is going to show through the static."

He looked at her, apparently expecting some kind of response, but all she could come up with was:

"Okaaaay?"

Arms still folded, he glanced away.

"If you go back to Sunnydale, bad things will happen."

Her mind was effectively blank; what was she supposed to think when he said something like that?

"Bad things?"

"Bad." He shifted his shoulders, not quite in a shrug, more like they were tense and he was trying to work a kink out of them. "That place holds pain for you; near future, middle, and far future too. All the way out to a couple of years from now, as far as I can see with any clarity at all." He hesitated, struggling with something he apparently didn't want to say. Or maybe something he thought he_ shouldn't_ say. "Maybe it would be better if you didn't go back there."

She eyed him warily, not sure how to take this sudden advice. Especially coming so soon after he'd promised not to interfere with what she did or how she lived her life.

"Are you supposed to be doing this? I mean, 'actively interfering' with a mortal like me an' shit?"

He gave her a sour look, but didn't argue with her insinuation that he wasn't mortal himself.

"No, I'm not supposed to be doing this, and it's a better rule than most of them; I shouldn't be breaking this one, for your sake at the very least." He turned and walked a few paces away, and when he spoke again only her Slayer ears let her catch the words. "But… I like you. I don't want you to get hurt when it could be avoided."

She blinked at that, then grinned. Despite herself, she felt just a touch of the warm and fuzzies.

"Thanks. But this stuff you're talkin' about, it's not definitely going to happen, is it?"

"No, not definitely," He admitted. "But you and Buffy-"

Faith interrupted before he could start bashing the older Slayer again.

"Me an' Buff will take on whatever's looking to fuck with us. Don't worry; she saved me before, she'll help me again." She grinned wider, imagining how cool it would be to fight against some big uber-nasty while standing shoulder to shoulder with the blonde girl. "Whatever this thing is, it'll be toast before it causes any of this horrible pain you see."

He gave her a totally unreadable look, and after a few seconds nodded resignedly.

"Hokay then." He said softly. She frowned then, suddenly a bit unsure.

"You don't think we'll make it?"

He started to answer, caught himself, then spoke with great care.

"All I can say is that I believe you have a greater chance of surviving this than any other who now lives."

Faith's grin came back.

"That's exactly what you said to me right before I went to fight that Beast."

He nodded, the faint smile on his lips still not reaching his eyes.

"Yes, and see how that turned out." She laughed out loud at that, and his eyes finally caught up with the smile. "Well, you lived, didn't you?"

She nodded, giving her backpack a little snap upwards with her wrist that sent it sailing fifty feet or more into the clear mountain air.

"Yep, I lived. And it doesn't suck."

The pack came down, and she caught it easily. The old man walked over then, stopping just in front of her. She stood there, wondering what he was doing as he reached over her shoulder, but when he pulled her hair forward she knew.

There, tied into the dark brown strands, were three black feathers. The first two she'd seen before, the newest one was tied into place with what looked like long strands of pure white. Instinctively she recognized them as hairs from the coat of the white hart. She looked up from the feather, meeting his gaze. At this range the solid black eyes could have seemed really creepy, but they weren't. Strange-looking or not, there was caring there. He tapped the feather.

"That's three; more than most find the strength to bear, especially so young. I think, though, that you'll be earning quite a few more of these." He stepped away. "I'll be watching you, from time to time. Warding you, too, but not against anything you'll ever see."

She nodded, perhaps understanding more than he knew.

"Like that lighting bolt?" She tilted her head towards the far side of the valley, where the smoke from the fire up there was now clearly visible. "You wouldn't start a fire just to prove a point, would you?" He narrowed his eyes, and she grinned smugly. "Didn't think so. Somebody 'up there' didn't like what you were saying. They tried to fry me right where I was sitting, didn't they?"

He just looked at her, his face revealing nothing.

"What I can't do is protect you from things here, things originating on this level."

Faith snorted.

"Like what? Vamps and stuff? Don't worry, I can take care of myself."

He nodded slowly.

"Yes, I suppose you can." He turned, pointing towards the southern end of the lake. She glanced in that direction, but her attention was mostly centered upon his braid. Long enough to reach the small of his back, she'd noticed before that even in the darkness it had seemed unusually black for someone of his apparent age. Now, in bright sunlight, the glossy strands again caught at her attention. Something was nagging her….

"You don't have to hike out of here. There's a lodge a mile or so in that direction, you can see it from further down the shore." He didn't look pleased about the human intrusion into such a beautiful, maybe even holy place, but when he looked back at her there was no anger there.

_Of course he's not angry; it's just more change, more transformation. It isn't evil in itself, even if it's intrusive. It just_ is.

"You can hitch a ride out with some rich tourist, I'm sure."

She nodded, but her mind was on other things.

"Yeah, but I think I'm gonna walk." She'd been gone for days, one more wouldn't hurt anything. "I've got time. 'Sides, I kind of like it here."

He smiled at her.

"I know what you mean. All right, then. Time for me to go." And with nothing more than that, he turned away and started walking towards the edge of the forest. As she watched him, Faith suddenly realized what it was about his braid. Her eyes, the eyes of a Slayer, and also whatever else she was or would one day become, suddenly saw deeper. That glossy, utterly black braid wasn't made up of hair… it was made from feathers. Tiny black feathers, so small that there must be thousands of them there, tens or hundreds of thousands, mimicking the outline of the braid almost perfectly. The old man passed through the first of the trees, and between one moment and the next he was simply gone.

Gone from view, but as she stood there on the grass, Faith felt a giant buffeting, and heard a sound as if of vast wings beating. The water behind her stood up in ripples all across the surface of the lake, and it continued to do so until the sound gradually faded away.

Looking down at her left hand, she considered the two rings; one with the tracery of delicate flames, the other with the bird, a Raven, forever in flight. Both of them, in some way, reflected what she was, but it was up to her to figure out just what that might mean.

_And that's a good point. If Giles sees these, he might know what they are, and ask me where I got 'em. That could cause trouble all down the line, and I'm sure-_

She frowned, turning her hand from side to side. A moment earlier the bright sunlight had been reflecting from the rich coppery metal, but now it was shining from a pair of plain silver rings, unremarkable in every way. Faith ran a finger across the one, and it responded by shifting back to copper. A moment's concentration, and it was silver once more.

_Cool! I wonder if--_ She tried turning her right shoe into a sandal, and when that didn't work she tried for a different color of material. Neither one worked, and she sighed. _Okay, it's the rings, not me. Oh well, it's still a good trick._

The sun was warm, and the morning chill was fading rapidly from the breeze as well. Standing on the shore of the bright lake, she found herself reluctant to start a day-long hike while she was still grungy and smelly. She glanced around, but there was no sign of anyone from the distant lodge. Neither was there any feel of compulsion, as there had been that night when the spirits wanted her to dive in a little spring-fed pool for some kind of pre-quest ritual cleansing.

_Fuck cleansing, I just wanna get clean!_

Quick as that she was pulling off her shoes and shucking her pants. When she'd added her top to the pile she wasted no time in wading into the water. It was cold, but she could handle it easily; after all, she was Fire, wasn't she?

Faith laughed out loud, diving briefly beneath the surface and swimming a few dozen yards before coming up once more.

_And I've got all these naughty thoughts of Buffy to keep me warm, too._ She spun slowly in place a few times, relaxing back into the water and letting it support her as she took in the beauty of her surroundings.

_When I get back, it's going to be the Chosen Two, as often as I can manage it. If Giles doesn't like it, if he wants to try and stay with us all the time to keep an eye on things; fine. Let him try keeping up with the two of us for more than a couple of days. We're both young, and strong, and Slayers; he's just an old guy in tweed with some really outdated ideas about how people like me and her are supposed to act._

She wasn't going to give up on this. Not because Giles didn't like it, and for damn sure not because Willow didn't.

_Red thinks I'm trying to steal her girl? Okay then, that's what I'll do. Because she does care about me. And when I gross her out, well, at least she tells me._ Faith splashed some water away, then started swimming with long strokes towards the far side of the lake.

_As long as she's honest with me, as long as I don't have to second-guess where I stand with her, I'll be okay. It's enough to make a start._

From somewhere high overhead, a Raven uttered a mournful cry which echoes from lake to mountain and back again.

* * * * *


End file.
